They're oriented towards problem solving, any observant Muslim will have to recognize a whole world not submitting yet as a problem. So you need to keep them distracted.
As for engineers being more prone to fundamentalism in religion period, I've always thought it's because of an over reliance on rationalism. Some of them recoil from nihilism, but they don't want to embrace the fuzziness of humanism/romanticism. So they turn to system which allows to hide almost all the irrationality behind one single choice and then proceed mostly rationally from there. Some find this in libertarianism and NAP, some in other religions.