Assumptions
What does my headscarf mean to you? - Yassmin Abdel-Magied
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From the beginning, it is obvious that Yassmin Abdel-Magied follows a particular religion. She begins her TED Talk wearing a hijab and an abaya, both traditional clothing for Muslim women. She immediately asks the audience what they would assume if they saw a woman like her on the street, and half-jokingly asks the audience if they would assume that her husband forces her to wear all those clothes. She engages the audience and forces them to consider their own assumptions through interactive questions. Though her tone is light, Abdel-Magied addresses the unconscious bias created by media portrayal of certain people, and subverts every expectation. She is a boxer, an engineer, part of a car racing team, and the commander of an oil rig. However, she explains that when people see her, they assume that she is a mother, a housewife, oppressed, and a victim, simply because of her clear participation in religion. Her theatrical clothing changes and anecdotes from her life emphasize the upsetting assumption that she is helpless and unintelligent because of her religion. These assumptions arise from the common portrayal of religious women, and for Abdel-Magied, they are not true.
What it’s like to be Muslim in America - Dalia Mogahed
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Like Abdel-Magied’s TED Talk, Dalia Mogahed’s speech keeps a lighthearted tone, while addressing some very serious points. She begins by asking what the audience thinks she is when they see her, ranging from extreme (a terrorist?) to laughable (an airport security delay?). With jokes scattered throughout her speech, she keeps the audience engaged. Her talk is also very informative, as she presents statistics bearing the abundance of negative portrayals of Muslim people. She mentions that “80 percent of news coverage about Islam and Muslims is negative.” This huge amount of negative information is certain to create an overall negative image of Islam in the eye of viewers. When she chose to start wearing the hijab, her friends were aghast and felt it was oppression, while she herself felt liberated from societal beauty standards and empowered by her faith. In the wake of 9/11, media coverage overly emphasized the terrorists’ Islamic background, falsely attributing their violence to their faith. For Mogahed, this negative portrayal lead her to genuinely fear for her life, despite loving her religion and living a peaceful existence.