Serious Ethical Violations: Rania Awaad’s Shoddy Suicide Research

[AMusee]

Over the past ten years, liberal Muslim activists have made a concerted effort to use highly questionable research studies to push liberal policies onto the Muslim community.

For example, imagine wanting to push Muslims to vote for a left-wing politician. You could publish a report that “proves” that statistically the most important policy issue for the Muslim community is immigration. You could then use this “scientific” report to campaign in the Muslim community for this left-wing, pro-immigration politician and claim that, objectively, she is the candidate that best aligns with Muslim concerns.

The fact of the matter is, it is trivially easy to lie with statistics. That is the subject of the best-selling book How to Lie with Statistics, which was published in 1954 and is just as relevant nowadays as ever. The book details very simple methods that can be used to cook the books while making it seem like the statistical results are fully accurate.

And the “benefit” of this manipulation is that if you get caught, there is usually plausible deniability. Researchers can cover their tracks by claiming, “Whoops, I guess I made an innocent mistake there. My bad!”

Statistics Prove Muslims Are…Whatever You Want Them to Be​

The biggest example of liberal Muslims using statistical studies to basically shill for the Democratic Party, is Dalia Mogahed’s Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU).

We have reported on Mogahed’s nefarious role in the US government and CVE and her ongoing collaboration with Yaqeen Institute.

A whole report could be compiled on all the garbage ISPU spews out and how that garbage has been used to manipulate the Muslim community in particular political directions.

Just consider a recent report they published in the heat of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court controversy on the legality of abortion last month. Conveniently, ISPU had the statistical results on hand to quickly publish their findings that show how: “The Majority of American Muslims Believe Abortion Should be Legal in All or Most Cases.”

Over the past ten years, liberal Muslim activists have made a concerted effort to use highly questionable research studies to push liberal policies onto the Muslim community.

For example, imagine wanting to push Muslims to vote for a left-wing politician. You could publish a report that “proves” that statistically the most important policy issue for the Muslim community is immigration. You could then use this “scientific” report to campaign in the Muslim community for this left-wing, pro-immigration politician and claim that, objectively, she is the candidate that best aligns with Muslim concerns.

The fact of the matter is, it is trivially easy to lie with statistics. That is the subject of the best-selling book How to Lie with Statistics, which was published in 1954 and is just as relevant nowadays as ever. The book details very simple methods that can be used to cook the books while making it seem like the statistical results are fully accurate.

And the “benefit” of this manipulation is that if you get caught, there is usually plausible deniability. Researchers can cover their tracks by claiming, “Whoops, I guess I made an innocent mistake there. My bad!”

Statistics Prove Muslims Are…Whatever You Want Them to Be​

The biggest example of liberal Muslims using statistical studies to basically shill for the Democratic Party, is Dalia Mogahed’s Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU).

We have reported on Mogahed’s nefarious role in the US government and CVE and her ongoing collaboration with Yaqeen Institute.

A whole report could be compiled on all the garbage ISPU spews out and how that garbage has been used to manipulate the Muslim community in particular political directions.

Just consider a recent report they published in the heat of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court controversy on the legality of abortion last month. Conveniently, ISPU had the statistical results on hand to quickly publish their findings that show how: “The Majority of American Muslims Believe Abortion Should be Legal in All or Most Cases.”

The report includes two graphics, reproduced above and below.

You will notice with these ISPU reports that they often contrast Muslims with “White Evangelicals.” In study after study from ISPU, Muslims are the demographic foil to specifically White Evangelicals.

This conveniently aligns with how liberal Muslims want to think of themselves, namely, as the furthest thing possible from White Christian conservatives. In reality, American Muslims have a great deal in common (as well as notable differences), in terms of religious and spiritual values, with Christian conservatives, arguably much more in common than with political liberals. Many American Muslims would agree with this simply based on their life experiences living among and interacting with the Christian majority population. Yet, somehow, the data from ISPU consistently shows that the opposite of this is the case, and Muslims and Christian conservatives are like oil and water.

Another example. According to ISPU, Muslims are more likely than any other group to support coalition building with “racial justice activists” like Black Lives Matter, i.e., the pro-LGBTQ, pro-feminist, Democratic political group that now and again also addresses police violence against minorities.

You will notice with these ISPU reports that they often contrast Muslims with “White Evangelicals.” In study after study from ISPU, Muslims are the demographic foil to specifically White Evangelicals.

This conveniently aligns with how liberal Muslims want to think of themselves, namely, as the furthest thing possible from White Christian conservatives. In reality, American Muslims have a great deal in common (as well as notable differences), in terms of religious and spiritual values, with Christian conservatives, arguably much more in common than with political liberals. Many American Muslims would agree with this simply based on their life experiences living among and interacting with the Christian majority population. Yet, somehow, the data from ISPU consistently shows that the opposite of this is the case, and Muslims and Christian conservatives are like oil and water.

Another example. According to ISPU, Muslims are more likely than any other group to support coalition building with “racial justice activists” like Black Lives Matter, i.e., the pro-LGBTQ, pro-feminist, Democratic political group that now and again also addresses police violence against minorities.

What is notable is that, according to ISPU, Muslim support for racial justice activism is higher than what comparable studies report of the Black community’s support for this cause.

Newsweek:

Some of the steepest declines in support for the movement were found among African American respondents. Their support for the movement’s goals dropped from 67 percent to 56 percent since last April, while support for the movement’s strategies and tactics want from 65 percent to 49 percent.

How curious!

 

[AMusee]

And, as you might have guessed, the Muslim community is by and large a huge supporter of LGBTQIA+ rights, at least according to ISPU.

In one report, ISPU details how “LGBT Muslims Seek Inclusion.”

In 2015, ISPU told Muslims they “should welcome” the legalization of gay marriage.

In 2019, ISPU dropped any remaining facade with this report:

Now, some might think this is just rabid liberal ideologues like Mogahed projecting her biases onto the entirety of the Muslim community. But rest assured. ISPU does “real” “research” using “real” “data.”

Need “Data”? Mogahed Can Help​

Thanks to Mogahed’s outreach and collaborative spirit, other Muslim groups have learned that the statistics game can be highly profitable.

Yaqeen Institute is one example. Yaqeen has had an official partnership with Mogahed’s ISPU for years, and Mogahed is on the Board of Advisors of Yaqeen.

In 2018, Yaqeen released results of a survey they conducted to determine the “major sources of doubt” for the Muslim community. The biggest source of doubt according to their results, and I’m not joking here, was: “religious people.” Seriously.

Commenting on this bizarre result in our Review of Yaqeen:

Is it a strange coincidence that Omar Suleiman’s entire “compassionate orthodoxy” project discussed above is grounded on the assumption that “conservative” Muslims are not tolerant and gentle enough and then his institute produces a research survey that finds that the lack of tolerance and gentleness of “religious people” is the main source of doubt and apostasy?
Maybe there is no coincidence and it is just that Omar Suleiman has his fingers on the pulse of the Muslim community, fully in tune with its problems. But that explanation doesn’t work because the 2017 interviews with imams, chaplains, et al., from across the US didn’t surface “intolerant, mean religious people” as a significant factor. Do Omar Suleiman and Yaqeen know better than all these imams and scholars combined?

I guess amazing statistical coincidences follow Dalia Mogahed wherever she goes!

Now, Muslim mental health professionals are availing themselves of Mogahed’s unique expertise.

Rania Awaad Is Ambitious​

Last year, a small study on suicide rates quickly made national news, with coverage in outlets like NPR. The study implausibly claims that Muslims are twice as likely to attempt suicide as any other group.

The study lists Rania Awaad as the primary author, but other co-authors on the paper include Hooman Keshavarzi of Khalil Center, Hamada Altalib, and, coincidentally, Dalia Mogahed herself. Mogahed is not a professional psychologist or otherwise tied to academic psychology research, so one might wonder why she should appear as a co-author for this paper. Continue reading to find out.

 

[AMusee]

But who is Rania Awaad?

She was the Clinical Director at the Khalil Center’s Bay Area branch and is an Associate Professor of psychology who has been featured, over the past few years, by several Muslim organizations, all associated with the well-known Dawah Mafia. Notably, she is a Senior Fellow at Yaqeen Institute and a frequent collaborator with Ingrid Mattson’s Hurma Project.

These affiliations alone should be major red flags for those who know what Yaqeen and Ingrid Mattson are about.

Much more can be said about what exactly Awaad is doing in these spaces and what agendas she is pushing. But for now, let’s focus on her mental health advocacy.

The “Muslim Mental Health” Racket​

Recently, there has been a concerted effort in the American Muslim community to push the importance of mental health. Islamically, there is no problem with mental health awareness in and of itself. However, modern mental health as a discipline and practice stems from psychology, and psychology is a highly secular, liberalized field that is in countless ways anathema to Islam and the preservation of traditional Muslim institutions and lifestyle.

As a response, some Muslims have attempted to “Islamicize” psychology and mental health practices in order to “ground” them in traditional Islam. But — like all attempts to translate a foreign ideology into the conceptual framework of Islam, e.g., Islamic democracy, Islamic communism, Islamic feminism, etc. — the results leave much to be desired. What such efforts all have in common is they fail to adequately challenge the most fundamental premises of these fields, yet it is precisely within those premises that the most anti-Islamic content lies. So the Islamic adaptation must paper over these contradictions and the Muslim adapters have to pretend that they don’t exist. The final result is messy: Not fully Islamic, not fully secular. But often lucrative, nonetheless.

Fully elaborating these issues is beyond the scope of this article. What can be said briefly, however, is that this “Islamic psychology” is a secularizing and liberalizing influence on the Muslim community. This can be demonstrated by the fact that some of the most prominent educators on the Muslim mental health scene also happen to have a clear liberal message and often are at tensions, or outright conflict, with traditional imams, traditional Islamic family structure, traditional institutions of Islamic learning, etc.

The danger of Islamic psychology is that it takes advantage of the wider Muslim community’s naïve eagerness to embrace science and, in particular, medical science. This makes it the perfect Trojan horse for proliferating all manner of liberal and feminist values among religious, practicing Muslims who would otherwise reject such values as patently un-Islamic.

RELATED: The Campaign to De-Stigmatize Suicide in Islam

Awaad’s work is a prime example of this. Many of her lectures given at US mosques are dripping with an overt feminist message of women’s empowerment dressed up as “traditional Islam.”

Furthermore, she and her less prominent husband, Rami Nsour, have contributed a great deal in recent years to the feminist imam hunting project. They have collaborated with pro-LGBT deviant groups like Ingrid Mattson’s Hurma and FACE to push a “spiritual abuse” framework that attacks imams. Much more can be said on this, but interested readers can get a sense of the wider issue by reading the following reports:

The Curious Case of the MeToo Mufti: Abdullah Nana

FACE and Alia Salem: The Pro-LGBT Deviants Who Hunt Imams

Ingrid Mattson, HEART, and the Pro-LGBT “Muslim” Network Distorting Islam

Are Muslims Twice as Likely to Attempt Suicide?​

The main claim of Awaad’s study is laughably implausible. And when Awaad posted it on Twitter last year, some commenters immediately noted as much.

 

[AMusee]

All the current research on religion and suicide shows that Muslims are consistently the least likely to commit or attempt suicide.

At the global scale, Muslim suicidality is far lower than any other religious group.

But some might object that Awaad’s study is different because it concerns a minority Muslim population that faces discrimination from the wider non-Muslim society.

Well, on this aspect, previous research also sheds light.

For example, one academic, peer-reviewed study titled “Suicidal behavior among Muslim Arabs in Israel” looked at suicidal behavior in Israel, comparing Muslims with Jews. The study found that Muslims committed suicide at less than half the rate of Jews.

Is it plausible that Muslims in America face more discrimination, Islamophobia, and overall pressure than Arab Muslims living in Israel?

Another study comparing Muslims and Hindus in the UK also found that Muslims are at a lesser risk.

Other published academic studies comparing the suicide rates of the Muslim minority in countries like Bulgaria and India, found similarly lower suicide rates for Muslims compared to other religious demographics.

Awaad’s paper doesn’t cite any of these studies, nor does she even acknowledge the body of research that already exists on Muslims and suicide. Given that her results are so dramatic, didn’t Awaad or her co-authors think it wise to cross reference prior research?

Isn’t this gross incompetence? Or is it more than just incompetence?

Awaad Debunked by an Unlikely Source​

The Journal of the American Medical Association published Awaad’s paper last year, but recently published a note with the paper. The title of the note reads: Study Findings Appear to be the Result of a Stastictical/Methodological Artifact – Suppressor Effect.

A researcher took it upon himself to audit one aspect of Awaad’s paper: The statistical analysis. He found, basically, that there are significant errors made in that analysis. Essentially, Awaad’s conclusion is completely wrong, just as many had suspected.

Who’s at fault for this gross error?

Well, there is plenty of blame to go around.

But who is this intrepid researcher?

His name is Dr. Osman Umarji and you wouldn’t believe which Institute he works at…

Umarji is Director of Survey Research and Evaluation at Yaqeen. Maybe Yaqeen brought him in to clean up the shoddy statistical research Yaqeen has been dumping out over the years, putting its hard-earned zakat money to good use.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is this. Umarji posted his analysis on Twitter, but he failed to mention that his PDF refutation undermines fellow Yaqeenite, Awaad.

Umarji recognized in his tweet that Awaad’s “research letter” caused a lot of “commotion & anxiety.” Calling this “commotion & anxiety” is an understatement. I’m sure that blasting to the whole community that their youth suffer from an epidemic of suicide did more than raise a little anxiety for many Muslims.

 

[AMusee]

At least he seems to recognize the damage Awaad’s trash has caused. But he also seems to excuse Awaad when he says “Mistakes happen.”

Yes, mistakes do happen. The question, however, is: Were these mistakes the result of gross incompetence? Or is there more to the story? Only the authors and Allah know.

But, what we do know is that Yaqeen needs to make some retractions. They promoted Rania Awaad and her institute specifically on the issue of suicide.

Will Yaqeen demonstrate some accountability here and issue a clarification on their Senior Fellow’s false research that they helped spread in the Muslim community? You would think so given that their own researcher, Umarji, did the honors of debunking her (though it seems he did so in his capacity as an academic and not as a Yaqeen director).

But I’m not holding my breath.

The Unethical Part​

Again, falsely telling the Muslim community that their youth are more prone to kill themselves causes serious damage. It not only unnecessarily alarms the community about a communal crisis that doesn’t exist, it also makes it seem like Muslims are incredibly weak and fragile as a community. Think about it. Does the Muslim community in the US face more discrimination and hardship than other marginalized groups? If not, why is our youth turning to suicide more than these other groups?

This casts a huge negative light on the American Muslim community and, by extension, Islam. The irony is that many other studies show that Muslim religiosity is a preventer of suicide. Being Islamically devoted significantly reduces the risk of suicide.

But Awaad’s paper callously undermines this truth.

The fact that the results were completely false make it that much more egregious.

But we move from egregious territory to unethical territory when we realize that Rania Awaad launched her “suicide awareness” institute, Maristan, immediately before these results were published.

Can you imagine the lack of self-awareness, announcing your trash research and admitting that you are “ecstatic”?

You can see from these tweets that the whole operation from start to finish is alongside Dalia Mogahed, who seemed to have played an instrumental role in launching Awaad’s shady organization.

Awaad’s paper no where discloses the fact that she has her own suicide awareness institute that goes around taking big money from the Muslim community in order to “educate” them on an “epidemic” of suicide that, by sheer coincidence, she herself uncovered. In the Conflict of Interest Disclosures section of the paper, Maristan is not mentioned.

 

[AMusee]

How could such a huge conflict of interest not be noted? This is a clear ethical violation and it speaks volumes about who Rania Awaad and her collaborators are. On these grounds alone, the paper should be retracted and a professional ethics case opened to investigate further.

I mean, look at how brazenly Awaad’s Maristan markets the false results:

This is not exactly subtle. The false results are what, according to Awaad, necessitate the need to “further address” the topic of suicide. And how fortunate that her Maristan is dedicated to precisely that.

Create the problem and offer the solution in one fell swoop. It’s a highly efficient business model, actually.

Stanford Medicine should really look into it further.

And if Yaqeen had any shred of integrity, they would dump such an unethical researcher. Again, not holding my breath.

Awaad’s Spiritual Abuse​

Maybe Awaad’s husband Shaykh Rami Nsour’s “accountability” organization, In Shaykh’s Clothing, can help investigate too, maybe take some time off from bullying various imams and spend more time investigating the “ethics” of his wife’s work.

What kind of “spiritual abuse” has Awaad inflicted on the Muslim community with her incompetent research at a massive scale? It’s ironic because this is how Awaad defines “spiritual abuse” for Hurma Project:

“Religious leaders misusing authority to coerce or manipulate community members for personal gain, financial gain, sexual misconduct, harassment, bullying.”

Well, did Awaad engage in any emotional manipulation of the community by scaring them about a looming “suicide epidemic” using her authority as a Stanford-affiliate? And did she gain financially from this manipulation? Wouldn’t this make her a spiritual abuser par excellence?

Maybe the MeToo Mufti Abdullah Nana should get on the case, too, given how much of an expert on spiritual abuse he is. He, of course, was among the first to spread Awaad’s hoax.

Wow, jinn stories around a virtual campfire for Halloween! Rami and Rania sure know how to party.

 

[AMusee]

More Amazing Coincidences​

I noted above that amazing statistical coincidences seem to follow Mogahed wherever she goes. I also noted that Mogahed was listed as a co-author of Awaad’s study.

Well, it turns out that Mogahed played a critical part in this suicide study as her ISPU provided all the data! This is mentioned explicitly in the Methods section of the study.

Mogahed really went all out for Awaad. This is a partnership of epic proportions.

We have to wonder, if similar audits were done of ISPU reports, would we find similar examples of gross miscalculation, not to mention methodological problems with their sampling, etc.?

Making Awaad a Star​

As soon as Awaad’s false research was published, she went on a tour, with the help of the Dawah Mafia, to shill her institute and its services.

She wrote op-eds for national outlets, making American Muslims look like a community of mentally-fragile victims reeling from suicide.

Muslimmatters twice has published articles from Awaad, and one of the articles includes the false “twice as likely” claim:

Will Muslimmatters publish a report about Rania Awaad’s spiritual abuse?

In addition to Yaqeen and Muslimmatters, many of the usual suspects promoted her and her work, including Yasir Qadhi’s seminary, TISA:

Awaad is an esteemed faculty member of Qadhi’s TISA:

Rania Awaad pictured with quite a round up of deviants, feminists, and CVE partners for such a small faculty! The Omar-Suleiman-affiliated Religion News Service, an outlet dedicated to pumping out liberal sludge barely masked in religious garb, of course had to cover Awaad’s stunning and brave work.

 

[AMusee]

Cheer up, Dalia. The findings are fake.

 

[AMusee]

Awaad Wants to “Train” Your Imam​

I have written about the liberal activist campaign to destigmatize suicide and how it actually contributes to increasing suicide.

Awaad has launched a fundraising campaign for her program specifically targeting imams. This “500 Imams” training program is analogous to the training programs other liberal Muslim groups like HEART: Women and Girls and Ingrid Mattson’s Hurma Project have launched in recent years. These groups use the Trojan horse strategy I mentioned earlier. They directly target imams because that promises to yield the most influence on masjid communities across the country.

In the promo video, people like Abdullah Oduro of Yaqeen, Yasir Birjas of Almaghrib Institute, Ingrid Mattson, and Yasir Qadhi, praise Awaad’s work. I wonder if any of them will retract their endorsements now that the key data point Awaad used to justify the urgency of her work has turned out to be completely baseless. Basic integrity is in short supply these days, sadly.

In the end, it is outrageous that Awaad has taken advantage of the Muslim community to advance her own career on the basis of “research” that was stained from the start by unethical conflict of interest but, as it turned out, was also completely false.

Mosque leaders and imams in the American Muslim community ignore such outrageous behavior at the expense of the community’s interests.

 

[AMusee]

 

[AMusee]

Who Lied about Muslim Suicide?​

Muslims, including Imams and Zakat Donors got scammed on Mental Health. It's important to understand how.​

“O Allah, show me the truth as truth and guide me to follow it. Show me the false as false and guide me to avoid it.”

-Dua of Umar (RA)

In 2021, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Psychiatry published a research letter with a shocking conclusion: Muslims are twice as likely to attempt suicide as people of other faiths or those who have no faith at all.

You probably had heard about this as the authors promoted their “research letter” aggressively in the news media at the time. The conclusion is still widely cited by Muslim mental health practitioners and used as zakat and other donation fundraising fodder for organizations like Maristan and Khalil Center, the leaders of which created this bombshell research. The idea that Muslims are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide is now accepted as a scientific fact within much of the Muslim community. It’s also not true.

I understand that many Muslim donors will be impressed that this was published in a journal like JAMA Psychiatry by well-known mental health leaders within the Muslim community. I urge you to keep an open mind to the possibility things in medical journals can be wrong, and Muslim non-profit leaders can brazenly lie to Zakat donors and Imams. If you don’t think these things can possibly be true, there would be no point in reading on or subscribing to this newsletter.

Much of this saga involves lying using statistics, but don’t let that intimidate you. I endeavored to write this article for people who don’t have statistical backgrounds, but you will need to be patent as we unwind this. By the end, I hope it will be plain.

It starts with an opinion poll
​

You are probably already familiar with opinion polls: the ones that ask a small sample, purporting to be representative of a larger population, questions asking things like if respondents prefer Democrats or Republicans. Well, our story begins with that kind of poll. The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) runs something called the “American Muslim Poll.” To produce this “American Muslim Poll,” ISPU hires a polling company to survey Muslims, Jews, and others on social and political views. ISPU then promotes the results, offers insights to the media, and then, naturally, collects zakat from the Muslim community because they believe this activity somehow constitutes “intellectual jihad.”

How does ISPU decide which questions to include in their poll? Well, at least in part, they sell questions to interested parties. In preparation for the 2019 American Muslim poll, it had sold a couple of questions to authors of what ultimately became the JAMA Psychiatry research letter (the ISPU Director of Research, Dalia Mogahed, is also credited as an author).

The poll
​

ISPU’s roles include some of the survey design (in consultation with a vendor and clients), fundraising, marketing, and promotion. The poll was conducted by Social Science Research Solutions (SSRS), which is rated a “C” pollster by FiveThirtyEight, on the low side (A+ is the highest rank) because of the organization’s 60% accuracy in predicting election results.

Margins of error
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ISPU did a survey in 2019 to find out how many Muslims, Jews, and other people tried to kill themselves, 2,376 people in surveys of different groups. They found that 7.9% of Muslims, 5.1% of Protestants, 6.1% of Catholics, and 3.6% of Jews reported trying to kill themselves at some point, those were only of the people surveyed. But the number for Muslims is not necessarily worse than everyone else because of the margin of error, which means the actual number could be a little (or a lot) higher or lower. Remember, this is a small sample, and it does not perfectly represent the populations of people who follow these faith traditions.

ISPU’s numbers, when you incorporate their own margin of error means somewhere between 3-12.8% of all Muslims attempted suicide at some point, and somewhere between 0-11.2% of Jews attempted suicide at some point, this is because of a ±4.9% margin of error for Muslims and a ±7.6% margin of error for Jews. They didn't survey other religions separately as they did with Muslims and Jews, so they didn't provide “margin of error” information for other faiths, but if you calculate it yourself you will find all these numbers on suicide fall within the margins of error and thus don’t tell you anything.

The “research letter” does not use margins of error- but rather something called “p-value” to decide if the numbers mean something. Margins of error and p-value can be used to fool people into thinking worthless information is earth-shatteringly important. In some cases (and as I will show here) it may be easy to simply lie about the numbers to get the desired result.

ISPU didn't mention the suicide attempt data for Muslims in their report on the 2019 American Muslim poll as that would have been pointless. It became worth discussing once the numbers were massaged (or tortured).

When adjusting for demographic factors
​

The authors of the JAMA Psychiatry Research Letter achieved headlines based on the strength of this conclusion:

US Muslim adults were 2 times more likely to report a history of suicide attempt compared with respondents from other faith traditions, including atheists and agnostics. (Emphasis added)

How do you get a shocking headline-grabbing result from what used to be an survey result that showed you nothing?

The JAMA letter authors include an important qualifier that carries mountains of weight here, their conclusion that American Muslims are twice as suicidal as everyone else only happens “when adjusting for demographic factors.” This may beg the question: how did they “adjust” the numbers to come up with this result? The authors took numbers with no statistical significance and ran them through a computer program to run “regression analysis”- a technique to show relationships between variables. Only after the authors did this, they got the results that would otherwise be impossible to obtain.

Let’s Frankenstein the data
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Yaqeen Institute Scholar and statistician Dr. Osman Umarji (writing through his University of California, Irvine affiliation) wrote to JAMA Psychiatry (his long-form reanalysis is here) and then posted a comment to the research letter after re-running the data. In it, he describes two principal critiques, which I will endeavor to simplify:

The first is that the authors started with nothing of value. There was nothing to report regarding the number of Muslims who attempt suicide and other faith groups, at least not from the ISPU data. Remember, you take the raw numbers, and they not only don’t show Muslims are twice as likely to attempt suicide, but they also provide you with no conclusions at all. There was no justification for doing a regression analysis in the first place. This is because it’s only going to result in torturing data so it can tell you what you want it to say.

The second criticism is that the result of this data torture (regression analysis) is a “suppressor effect”- an error that statisticians have known about for over 100 years. Dr. Umarji took the position that the result was false mainly because of the way the authors treated race, accounting for a major variable that did not exist.

 

[AMusee]

Fun with race
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The ISPU data combined with the JAMA author’s work portrayed an American Muslim community as more Non-Arab White than Asian.

The US Muslim Community, according to the JAMA authors (the ISPU report showed this somewhat differently) in 2019, was 26% black, 26% white, 24% Asian, 10% other, and 14% Arab.

The factors leading to why the JAMA author’s regression led to erroneous results were:

1. The reference group (regression analysis needs them) was non-Arab white, a group with a high rate of suicide attempts and likely overrepresented in the American Muslim Survey.
2. ISPU, in its 2019 report, excluded Asians completely from their “general population” survey because their sample size was too small for them to have enough confidence in their numbers. The Muslim survey did include Asians. Its odd a medical journal research letter used numbers on Asians that ISPU, which was in charge of the survey the JAMA authors relied on, explicitly said they themselves don’t have confidence in.
3. According to ISPU data from 2019, “Arab” is a race in the United States that is exclusively Muslim. It’s not that ISPU had a small sample of non-Muslim Arabs in their data; they had nothing. The lack of any non-Muslim Arabs created a “correlation” between “Arab” and “Muslim”- when all Arabs are Muslim it’s hard to compare it with anything. A high correlation is known to cause inaccurate results in the kind of analysis the authors were doing. Since the computer program does not know what to do, it starts to give you garbage.

It should not be surprising that nobody has yet come up with a way to generate accurate conclusions from data that does not exist. An attempt divine such a conclusion is not math or science, it’s soothsaying.

You don’t need a degree in statistics or understand terms like “suppressor effect” or multicollinearity to understand this kind of game-playing would go disastrously wrong, or exactly right if you were fishing for a specific result.

How to improve validity with invisible data
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Rania Awad, the lead author of the JAMA Psychiatry study, responded in her comment stating about race:

ncluding race in the model improves the predictive validity of the model and may provide a more accurate representation of the relationship between religion and suicide attempt. Race is a fundamental control variable that must be considered when studying any suicide epidemiologic study.

She further explains:

We can’t simply remove the variable because Arab Christians were underrepresented in this sample.

Awaad was overly generous to herself here. Arab Christians were not merely “underrepresented” - they did not exist. If race were a “fundamental control variable” when it came to studying Muslim suicide attempts, she should have obtained adequate data on the races she figured were important. Dr. Awaad is attempting to convince us data that is “fundamental” to her work must be incorporated even if it’s invisible to her and the software program she was using.

The JAMA Psychiatry authors mangled the numbers they had to arrive at their desired conclusion. There was no other way to arrive at the author’s conclusion that Muslims are twice as likely to attempt suicide without running these visible and invisible numbers through Dr. Awaad’s gratuitous regression analysis blender.

Certified error-free!
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ISPU’s Dalia Mogahed, a credited co-author of the study, publicly claimed after Dr. Umarji’s critique that the authors had three independent biostatisticians review the work. The identity of these biostatisticians appears to be a secret, even from co-authors (including a couple of authors I spoke to who publicly bragged about their supposed existence) and JAMA itself.

Various authors, including the Lead Author Dr. Rania Awaad, and Senior Author Dr. Hamada Altalib took to Twitter to make similar claims, all the while, accusing Dr. Osman Umarji of disinformation and being a liar.

Here are a few of the claims the co-authors made:

1. Three separate statisticians at top-tier institutions found no errors, and the suppressor error was baseless.
2. JAMA found “NO ERRORS” (emphasis in original) in the analysis, and on this basis “denied Dr. Umarji a platform to publish.”
3. The data was “blindly reviewed” by JAMA.

While the identity of the statisticians is secret, it’s impossible they found the suppressor error “baseless” since the authors themselves did not believe the suppressor error was baseless (I will get to that). I verified from JAMA editors I spoke with that the other two claims made by Dr. Awaad were false.

Dr. Awaad also alluded to a “rebuttal” sent to JAMA, which she did not make public. Fortunately, I obtained a copy, and when you read it, it’s easy to understand why she decided to keep it under wraps.

Agree in secret, attack in public
​

The problem is the authors themselves, in their “rebuttal” to JAMA Psychiatry, admitted Dr. Umari’s claim (you can read his reanalysis letter to JAMA here) had validity. They did not disclose this to the public or to Dr. Umarji, who they publicly attacked, accused him of spreading disinformation, called him a liar, and even claimed the “suppressor effect” error he described was baseless. The authors themselves privately told JAMA in their response (which I make public in the link):

In this sample, being Arab may be a confounder and serve as a suppressor variable. However, as we argue above it is critical to include race in the model so that readers can see the potential effect. Our intent of publishing this Research Letter is draw attention to an under-recognized issue and promote further discourse on suicide across communities. (emphasis added).

The authors privately agreed the suppressor effect concern was valid. The authors sent this to JAMA before telling the Muslim community on social media the suppressor effect was baseless and that Dr. Umarji was a liar and troll peddling disinformation. Both of those cannot be true at once. Drs. Awaad and Altalib lied to the Muslim community and unjustly attacked Dr. Umarji.

We also learned research letter was not about reality but about “potential effect” and to promote “discourse on suicide.” The authors also claim that the suppressor effect may enhance accuracy, but of course, they have no way of knowing any of this and had no basis for publishing what amounts to a fever dream.

Why would JAMA verify no errors when the author’s response agreed the data on Arabs may serve as a suppressor after all? Of course, JAMA never claimed there were no errors. That’s both ridiculous and explicitly, against JAMA’s terms of use. They do not rerun data, based on my conversation with JAMA editors. Despite Dr. Awaad’s penchant for speaking for JAMA on Twitter, one JAMA editor told me, “Dr. Awaad does not speak for JAMA.”

The incredible shrinking p-value
​

I previously mentioned Dr. Umarji had offered two criticisms of the JAMA Psychiatry suicide claims. The authors only seemed to secretly concede the second point (on a suppressor effect, while claiming it may still be a good thing somehow). The first was why do a regression analysis on data that means nothing to start with? You can always torture useless data in a myriad of ways to make it seem like whatever you want. The authors disagreed with Umarji by claiming the unadjusted data was actually meaningful. The reason is because of something called “unadjusted odds ratios.” In this case measure of association between two things, suicide, and religion. This was another way of calculating something like a margin of error (a concept most of us non-statisticians are familiar with).

The JAMA Research letter provided an unadjusted odds ratio here; note that since Protestants are the dominant group and the reference, that is the number that mattered to the authors:

The most important number on this chart says that the P-Value for the reference population (Protestants) was 0.10 in the unadjusted odds ratio, which is the same as saying they have nothing or that it is statistically insignificant. In general, a p-value of 0.05 or less is statistically significant (and thus worth talking about). The p-value of 0.10 is more than 0.05 and thus worthless. It’s like showing an opinion poll with a margin of error of infinity in either direction. Who would care?

Both publicly and privately, the authors provided the unadjusted odds ratios again to justify why they would go on their data-Frankensteining expedition with “regression analysis.” How do they do this when we established they had nothing? Well, that’s where things get even more interesting.

 

[AMusee]

Below is the table provided by Dr. Awaad publicly on the JAMA website comment section, rebutting Dr. Umarji’s comment:

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The screenshot below is from the private “rebuttal” to JAMA Psychiatry’s editors:



https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...2b7e8-34d2-4363-9b20-e5c869fb742b_624x188.png
Wiz-bang regression analysis was now justified because the P-value of Muslims vs. Protestants magically changed to 0.050 from 0.1 in the research letter itself, with the same data. What you are looking at with these charts is a change in the p-value, a measure of statistical significance in scientific literature. The authors took the liberty of making it up.

In scientific journals, researchers are sometimes accused of “p-hacking”- which is a process of manipulating data to get a result they can publish. This was not “p-hacking”- the authors simply deleted one number they published in their original JAMA research letter and replaced it with a different number without any new data or math to support it. It was a lie, an especially sloppy one to boot. You don’t need specialized math education to see it.

I notified an author of the doctored p-value several months ago. That co-author felt changing the p-value to defend the letter and attack Dr. Umarji was somehow not lying and cheating but did not explain how. A low P-Value (0.05 or less) is vital for getting things published in scientific journals. In the article, reaching a low p-value for the unadjusted odds ratio was unnecessary since the author’s tortured regression analysis gave them a great p-value with a massive fake difference between Muslim suicide attempt rates and everyone else. So, they kept the unadjusted odds ratio undoctored the first time.

But now that they had to privately admit Dr. Umarji had a point regarding the suppressor effect and correlated variables (data torture), the authors needed to show that they had a reason to do the regression analysis that got them the “potential” effect they wanted to show the world. So, the authors lied by making up a “p-value.”

This conduct should be impossible to defend.

A conflicts of interest bonanza
​

Two authors, Dr. Rania Awaad and Hooman Keshavarzi, failed to disclose conflicts of interest. Both have noted their affiliations with Maristan and Khalil Center in the article, but not in the section on conflicts.

This nondisclosure plainly goes against a principle stated in JAMA editorial about disclosure:

an author who serves or recently has served as an officer of a medical society or advocacy organization who writes about topics that have relevance for that organization also is expected to include that additional information in his or her COI disclosures.

If you have an organization that advocates for the perspective that Muslim mental health is in horrible shape and your organization can help if more people send you money (especially Zakat), that may well color your findings. A Muslim mental health advocacy group is unlikely to herald a study finding Muslims attempt suicide at the same rates as everyone else or that they ran the numbers and have no idea about anything either way (leaving aside the question of who would publish such a thing).

The authors did not treat this letter as some sort of preliminary or tentative finding on Muslim suicide. Dr. Awaad brought in a media foghorn to promote the research letter aggressively. She leveraged the report to promote an alarmist and false claim that Muslims because they are Muslim, are more likely to try to kill themselves. She also fundraised from the JAMA letter.

Dr. Hamada Altalib, a co-author, did disclose his conflict of interests with a Muslim Mental Health advocacy group, though he noted his role in it (as well as his role as editor of a journal) is voluntary, unlike the co-authors who failed to disclose the conflict. Other co-authors disclosed their affiliations though they may not be conflicts at all.

The funders did nothing: The funders did everything
​

The authors tell us three organizations that funded the study are the Stanford Muslim Health and Islamic Psychology Lab, the Khalil Center, and the Institute for Muslim Mental Health. Dr. Awaad, Dr. Keshavarzi, and Dr. Altalib lead these organizations.

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Right below the disclosure on who the funders are, we have a statement on the role of the funders. The authors assure us the funders had no role in the “design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review or approval of the manuscript; and the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.”

Above this helpful disclosure, we get this:

It’s plain that the funders of the study had full control of the study. Awaad, Keshavarzi, and Altalib headed organizations that funded the study- the same organizations we were assured had no role in doing the exact same things the three of them also claim to have done. The authors and funders (who claim to be Zakat-eligible) were the same.

Either there was a check-the-box game going on with the editors and peer reviewers a copy editor should have caught the inconsistency, or there was a mistake in the disclosure.

Either way, it should give pause even for those Muslims who think “peer review” is the mark of excellence and a talisman to hold up asserting what is in those hallowed pages is truth.

 

[AMusee]

Muslims should ignore grifting because we care about mental health
​

It’s essential to address the following from Dr. Awaad:

To be precise (fact-checking everything Dr. Awaad says would be exhausting), the research letter said nothing about an “increasing” Muslim suicide rate. Like so much of what Dr. Awaad says, she made that up.

Dr. Rania Awaad and the other JAMA Psychiatry paper authors produced a cooked conclusion about American Muslims they could not legitimately support, then lied to support it. There should be no confusion about this.

The authors hyped this lie in the media, and raised money, including zakat from the Muslim public. They took full advantage of conflicts of interest they obviously had but did not bother to disclose. The authors also attacked a Muslim scholar for lying and spreading disinformation when they knew he was telling the truth and privately admitted as much. They then brazenly doctored the results of a p-value to make themselves look good, right in plain sight.

Muslims in the United States need to know about this grift, even if it means the public will have less confidence in Muslim mental health professionals.

Who has “stigma”?
​

The term “stigma” comes from Greek, it’s a physical mark or brand that comes as a result of disgrace, historically because of things like lying and cheating. The ethical history of the mental health profession is a waking nightmare, mainly because it has had an overabundance of people who cut corners while residing in a moral wasteland where almost anything is okay. If there is a stigma around mental health care, it’s with the mental health profession and not ordinary Muslims. Stigma has come to a sector that helped the US government torture Muslims and participated in countering violent extremism, the repressed memory movement, and other horrors that extend throughout the sector’s history. This contrived Muslim suicide saga is just another chapter in an ongoing story.

Muslim mental health providers can be beneficial
​

Muslim mental health professionals can be a benefit to humanity and move us away from the stigma caused by the mental health sector’s sordid history. To do this, they need to move beyond being a den of Zakat-mooching fabulists, national security contractors, and ethically challenged hucksters on Islamic convention stages and Imam trainings on Muslim Suicide.

O Allah, show me the truth as truth and guide me to follow it. Show me the false as false and guide me to avoid it.

Who Lied about Muslim Suicide?

Muslims, including Imams and Zakat Donors got scammed on Mental Health. It's important to understand how.

ehsan.substack.com