Being Muslim in America (and MIT) in 2016

Last December, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. In March, he added that “I think Islam hates us.” Cambridge City Councilman Nadeem Mazen and Wise Systems co-founder Layla Shaikley–both MIT alumni–join engineering masters student Abubakar Abid to explore how this type of hateful, discriminatory rhetoric influences public opinion, discuss its impact on the daily lives of Muslim-Americans, and examine strategies for combating it.

Nadeem Mazen is an MIT graduate, Cambridge’s first Muslim city councilman and CEO of the Cambridge makerspace danger!awesome.

Layle Shaikley is an MIT alum, co-founder of Wise Systems and co-founder of TEDxBaghdad. With her viral video sensation “Muslim Hipsters: #mipsterz,” she helped launch a national conversation about how Muslim women are represented.

Abubakar Abid is a engineering masters student at MIT and a member of the Muslim Student Association.

Moderator: Seth Mnookin, associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and director of the MIT Communications Forum.