The Muslim Suicide Trick

On Muslim Mental Health Nonprofits and their head games in the Muslim community.

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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 due to the authors promoting their study 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.  

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. However, there is ample reason to be skeptical that the claim is true. This is the first in my three-part series walking through how the Muslim community was hoodwinked and donors have been giving money to mental health nonprofits and leaders apparently based on false pretenses. Of course, suicide is a serious issue, just like it was before this study. It deserves to be studied and discussed seriously. Unfortunately, that did not happen. 

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. 

According to ISPU, SRSS surveyed 804 Muslims, 360 Jewish respondents, and an unclear number of people they termed “general population”- though the total number surveyed was 2,376, so I assume 1,212 (a number ISPU does not directly identify, so this was from subtraction). 

Margins of Error

ISPU claims the margin of error for the American Muslim Poll in 2019 at a 95% confidence level (that is industry standard, not the actual level of confidence anyone has) is 4.9% for Muslims, 7.6% for Jews, and 3.6% for the “general population.”  

Based on their 2019 poll, 7.9% of Muslims, 5.1% of Protestants, 6.1% of Catholics, and 3.6% of Jewish respondents reported trying to kill themselves at some point. The Muslim number looks worse than everyone else, but not in the context of the margin of error. The number of Jews and Muslims surveyed shows differences between the JAMA letter and the ISPU report, likely because the “general population” survey did not exclude Muslims and Jews, and the surveys of Muslims and Jews excluded everyone else. 

If you are familiar with “horse race” political reporting during elections, you know a 2% difference between, say, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump means nothing if you have a 4% margin of error, that’s a “dead heat.”

The way to read the numbers combined with the margins of error provided by ISPU themselves is as follows:

Somewhere between 3-12.8% of all Muslims attempted to kill themselves at some point. 

Somewhere between 0-11.2% of Jews tried to kill themselves at some point.

ISPU/SRSS did not survey other religions as they did with Muslims and Jews, so neither ISPU nor the JAMA authors furnished margin of error information for other faiths, but it’s easy to calculate those numbers on a margin of error calculator. You will get similarly meaningless results. 

ISPU’s 2019 American Muslim Survey report initially did not mention Muslim suicide attempt data, likely because it was pointless to mention it at the time. It became worth discussing only later. 

How to get a Shocking Headline from Nothing

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 inconsequential survey result? I will get to that, but first, a hypothetical: 

Say you flip 21 coins once, and the result is 11 heads and 10 tails. A leading statistician then writes, in a prominent scholarly journal on coin-flipping, that your coin flip is twice as likely to land on heads than tails. You understand, from grade-school level math that 11 is not twice 10, and you intuitively know how coin flips work. But this information is published in a respected journal by a prominent statistician, so you need to accept it as scientific truth. You then learn this result happens because the statistician subjected the coin flip data to regression analysis taking into account the year the coins were engraved. This worked even though this was a small sample and many coin years were either over or under-represented.

Now here, it makes sense to ask some questions. 

• Why subject the data to this kind of analysis at all? 

• Why would any self-respecting statistician go through the trouble of torturing coin-flip data to come up with such an obviously flawed result? 

• How would an otherwise respected coin-flip journal end up publishing this nonsense? 

By the end of the series, I hope all of this will become clear, but in the context of the claim Muslims are twice as likely as everyone else in attempting suicide.

The Attack of the Authors

Getting back to the JAMA Suicide Research letter, Dr. Osman Umarji, an Al-Azhar and University of California, Irvine trained scholar and statistician at the Yaqeen Institute, wrote a comment on the JAMA Psychiatry article pointing out the article had some serious errors and the conclusion was wrong, he did this following a lengthier letter to JAMA Psychiatry’s editors sent privately. The article’s authors publicly accused Umarji of “disinformation,” of being a liar, and “troll.” 

As I will discuss, Umarji was telling the truth. 

In the next article insha Allah, “Fun with Math, and Suicide,” I will go over how this charming little parlor trick worked. This story says much about the state of Muslim nonprofits and what passes for leadership in the Muslim community, and how Muslim donors, Imams, and well-meaning community leaders can be so easily fooled.

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