I was excited but skeptical as I clicked on a study published Sunday in the open source journal BMC Public Health titled An Exploratory Study of Muslim Adolescents' Views on Sexuality: Implications for Sex Education and Prevention. Excited because I don't work with Muslim adolescents and I imagine that people who do might have a lot to share about the work that I'd find familiar, different, and interesting. Skeptical because it's hard not to be afraid for Muslims, and even more for Muslim youth, at a time when it feels like racist and xenophobic attitudes towards Islam in general and Muslims in particular has reached a fevered pitch. What are the chances, I wondered, that what I'm about to read will be "exploratory" in an exploratory way, and not in a colonial or orientalizing way?
The chances, it seems, were slim.
The qualitative study examined 15 months worth of posts and discussion threads from a Dutch forum which was set up for adolescents in the Netherlands to discuss issues around Islam and sexuality. The forum was hosted on a website developed by STI AIDS Netherlands, a national organization that is primarily funded by the government and works to "prevent sexually transmitted infections and improve the quality of STI control in the Netherlands." The site itself was designed to offer information and support to Muslim adolescents (aged 14 to 24) in the Netherlands specifically about healthy sexual relationships and STI prevention.
The researchers began by categorizing the posts' authors as "Muslim youth" or "non-Muslim youth" and then compared the posts across several subject areas including sex before marriage, inter-religious relationships, masturbation, homosexuality, and abortion. In order to determine who was Muslim and who was not, they only included posts where the poster explicitly identified their religion. If they mentioned being a Muslim in the post, they were classified Muslim. If they mentioned being anything else, they were classified as non-Muslim. In the end they had posts from 77 visitors, 44 Muslims and 33 non-Muslims.
By their own accounts their findings were pretty much what they expected; the youth they categorized as Muslim held more conservative and/or negative views about sexuality and strongly gendered ideas of sexuality, and were less interested in talking about sexuality than the youth they categorized as non-Muslim.
There was one "surprise" finding. They found that the youth they put in the Muslim category would debate and disagree with an Imam's interpretation of a particular piece of text, when the Imam's interpretation was different from theirs. In their words, Muslim youth "cannot necessarily [be] persuaded by an Imam" when debating the meaning of a particular passage that implicitly deals with sexuality.
As I said, at first I was hoping that I might get something from this study. After all, despite the depth of thought in Islam around sexuality, and the diversity of opinions and understanding of sexuality and Islam among Muslims of various practices and beliefs around the world (let's not forget, we're talking about the second most practiced religion) non-Muslims don't get to hear much public discussion about sexuality and Islam. So as a non-Muslim who works on sex, I really wanted to learn something insightful. That's why I kept reading even after coming across this line on page 3:
"In no other religion or culture is sexuality so closely integrated with religious rules as in Islam."
Let me point out that this statement could be said to be completely false, if it made any sense at all. But it doesn't. And I kept reading even after making my way through the methodology and results section that made it abundantly clear that the researchers believe that:
a) you can talk about "Muslim adolescents" as if they are a group with homogenous beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors about either sexuality or religion, or both,
and
b) the kinds of discussions you'll find Muslim youth having on a site that is sponsored by a government widely considered to be hostile to Islam and Muslims represents the kinds of conversations "Muslim adolescents" are having with their peers and family.
This kind of generalization all dressed up in an authoritative power suit of science is a terrible and classic example of Orientalism.
First they isolate a group based on convenience, contrivance, and cultural stereotypes (here "Muslim adolescents" get represented by youth who have gone on to a public, government funded forum and in the course of writing have self-identified as Muslim).
Next they point out certain things about the group, that are supposedly unique to them, and naturally characteristic of them (so "Muslim adolescents" don't want to talk about sex, hold negative beliefs about pleasure, masturbation, inter-faith marriage, abortion, and disagree with their religious leaders, and "Muslim adolescents" are like that because, well, their "Muslim adolescents"). But these supposedly unique characteristics could be found among any youth of any religion if you get them on the right day, in the right context, and study them with the right methods.
Finally, by contrasting them with another normative group (you guessed it, "non-Muslims") they are further producing, entrenching, and making strange the category of "Muslim" youth.
If the point of this research is to understand something more about actual people acting in the world, situating them as stereotypes works against your point. And couching insights within a completely generalized framework, devalues the insights themselves and plays into the kinds of stereotypes that are all too prevalent.
The researchers made much of how difficult it is to get Muslim youth to talk to them about sexuality. Reading the paper it's not hard to understand why. And what's equally unfortunate is that in the end there's no way that this research is going to help them achieve their well intentioned goals. And it certainly isn't going to help the diverse range of Muslim youth in Holland, all of whom no doubt could benefit from good sex education.
Read more - An exploratory study of Muslim adolescents' views on sexuality: Implications for sex education and prevention. BMC Public Health 2010, 10:533
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Cory, I think this sort of critique is thought and important. That said, while I agree with much of your critique, I’m not sure it fully invalidates the research. I would say your critique exposes limitations of both the data and (much more so) the authors’ interpretation of it.
But, at least the way I read your article, you almost suggest that there is no value in collecting data from such a population, that doing so itself is inherently “orientalizing,” and I wouldn’t go so far. I would certainly agree that an important limitation of the study is that it is, at best, unknown what the relationship between the study population and the general population they (supposedly) represent is. But of course that is always a problem with social science, and good social scientists acknowledge and confront that problem transparently. It sounds like this study did not, from your description and quotes, and the researchers should rightly be blamed for that.
But again, that doesn’t mean that the data they collected tells us nothing about Muslim adolescent sexuality–it seems to me it offers some insights, but they are as yet an incomplete picture of the whole. But that’s what’s so good about incremental science. Someone else can study a population in a more Muslim-friendly country (e.g., a predominantly Muslim country!) and then (theoretically) the two data sets can be compared against each other. Over time, incomplete glimpses like this can add up to an increasingly accurate collective depiction. To be sure, that agenda is undermined by a lazy reliance on stereotypes and cavalier generalizations, and on those grounds the researchers must be held to account. But I wouldn’t want any young researchers to read your post and think that it’s categorically foolhardy to study a population by means of its participation on the Web. You have to start somewhere! The important thing that you correctly note is to be cautious about how you generalize from that population.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for asking about this, I’m pretty much never able to fully express myself in a blog! Thanks also for reading the whole thing (I may never express myself fully, but I sure use a lot of words).
To clarify, I’m definitely NOT suggesting people shouldn’t be trying to study other populations, nor do I think that gathering data online is a bad idea or any more inherently problematic than other methods of collecting people’s stories.
I want to learn about other people’s experiences as much as anyone, it’s why I was excited to see the abstract and why I read the study. But when we don’t interrogate and name the frames we use to gather information, we ignore the ways that those frames are themselves constructing the information. When I’m reading studies I’m always asking myself if I think the researchers are reliable narrators. Part of what goes into that evaluation is, of course, their methodology. And part is the way they write up their findings. In this study there was no comment or apparent awareness of the complicated political, cultural, ethic, religious, context within which they were collecting these stories. That’s a problem for me.
It doesn’t discount, nor would I want it to silence those stories they actually collected. But every story has a story of it’s own. Nothing exists in isolation, and in the end what I’d consider this research to be is a missed opportunity, not a complete waste of time.
Thanks again!
Cory