Al-Qa’eda is a conspiracy of alienated middle-class kids

When Sajid Badat, formerly of Gloucester, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to conspiring to blow up an aeroplane with a crude shoe-bomb device (before bottling it), there was an audible intake of breath among New Labour politicians and Muslim community leaders. The papers said he was quiet and bright, a good Muslim educated at a Church of England school (Gloucester’s prestigious Crypt Grammar School for Boys, which counts the late Sir Robin Day among its alumni). What was a nice kid like him doing hanging out with a nasty crew like al-Qa’eda?

In fact, Badat is about as archetypal an al-Qa’eda member as you will find. For al-Qa’eda is not a loony group from ‘over there’, peopled by weirdo Johnny Arabs raised on a diet of falafels and hatred for the West. On the contrary, it is as middle-class as the Women’s Institute (though with vastly different hobbies and interests). Its members tend to be well-educated and gainfully employed, and many became radicalised (or perhaps ‘terrorised’) over here. They are more like us than we care, or dare, to admit.

Dr Marc Sageman of the University of Pennsylvania has conducted an exhaustive study of al-Qa’eda’s people. He collected the life histories of 400 individuals either in al-Qa’eda or closely linked to it, and found that traditional theories of what motivates a terrorist — poverty, desperation, ignorance — did not apply in al-Qa’eda’s case. Indeed, some of them turned their backs on cushy lives to sign up for bin Laden’s fanciful war against the West.

A majority of Sageman’s sample were well-to-do: 17.6 per cent were upper class, 54.9 per cent were middle class and 27.5 per cent were lower class. For those individuals whose educational records were available, 16.7