Projects

This line of research aims to develop tools and educational content that train and prepare leaders and members of the Muslim community in raising awareness and managing suicidal crises. We are working on a comprehensive, Islamically-informed, evidence-based guide that assists community leaders in managing suicide across the spectrum of prevention, intervention, and postvention. In addition to content development, the team also plans on creating a suicide training curriculum for Imams and chaplains.

In this study, the SMMH Lab collaborates with the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding to survey American Muslim healthcare providers. The objective is to better understand their mental health state during the COVID-19 pandemic and identify coping mechanisms and protective factors against their mental health collapse. The study investigates whether Islamophobia in the workplace has been a contributing factor to American Muslim providers’ distress during this pandemic.

This study seeks to analyze Muslim experiences of communicative diseases focusing on the psychosocial impacts and responses of Muslim communities throughout history. This new perspective provides valuable insights for modeling pandemics’ psychological aspects, especially for religion’s role in such models. By examining a selection of plague outbreaks in the 8th-19th centuries across the lands broadly defined as the Islamic Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa to the Levant region and Anatolia (Varlık, 2017), the guidelines and coping mechanisms that Muslims extracted from their traditional sources provide insight for similar contemporary challenges regarding the pandemic of COVID-19. This study argues that the Islamic tradition effectively provides a rich set of resources for meaning-making of deadly epidemics and responding ethically and adaptively to such adversities.