Building a clock while Muslim

ON SEPTEMBER 14, Ahmed Mohamed, a high school freshman and electronics enthusiast in Irving, Texas, brought a project to school that he had been working on: a homemade digital clock assembled from electronic parts.

As he went to school that Monday morning, Ahmed never could have imagined that the day would end with his being put into handcuffs and suspended from school--nor that he would almost as quickly become an international symbol of the absurd depths that Islamophobia has reached in the United States.

The image of a distraught boy in the NASA t-shirt, with his hands cuffed behind his back, stunned the world as it went viral in the days that followed, leading to an inspiring #IStandWithAhmed twitter campaign--and to a doubling down on racism by right-wing politicians who have no qualms about smearing a 14-year-old Muslim boy of Sudanese descent if it suits their culture war.

The incident started when Ahmed brought his clock to MacArthur High School to show his engineering teacher. The teacher praised his work, but cautioned Ahmed not to show it to his other teachers. Later, when the clock beeped in class, his English teacher confiscated it, telling Ahmed, "It looks like a bomb."

Ahmed was later pulled out of class by his principal and a police officer, and led to a room with four other officers, where he was interrogated for the duration of more than one class period.

Although Ahmed explained from the beginning that his device was nothing other than a clock, he was handcuffed and, with his peers looking on, taken out of school to a juvenile detention center, where he was fingerprinted and further interrogated, all while being denied his repeated requests to speak with his parents, in violation of Texas family law.

Although Irving's police chief freely admitted that the cops never thought Ahmed's clock was actually a bomb, school and police officials continue to stand by their actions in the name of school safety. A statement on the Irving Independent School District's web site unrepentantly declares, "We will always take precautions to protect our students and keep our school community safe."

THESE SAME officials also claimed that Ahmed's religion played no role in their actions. However, everything about his ordeal says otherwise.

Leaving aside the fact that projects like Ahmed's are frequently brought to school by students who aren't subjected to the same treatment, it's clear enough that Islam was on the minds of the police and school officials who interrogated him.

According to Ahmed, when he was taken to the room where more officers were waiting to question him, one remarked, "That's who I thought it was." During the interrogation, the officers repeatedly brought up his last name. Ahmed told the Dallas Morning News that he "felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name--one of the most common in the Muslim religion."

This incident takes place in a Texas municipality that has been an epicenter of Islamophobic bigotry--starting right at the top with Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne.

Earlier this year, Van Duyne--whose supporters have dubbed her the "Irving Iron Lady," referencing Britain's former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher--was in the spotlight for her vocal support of proposed state legislation banning "sharia law." Following a campaign of rumors about Islamic courts being established in the area, Van Duyne undertook a speaking tour to denounce Islam as a religion intent on destroying the country "from within."

In June, the Irving City Council passed a resolution supporting the new state law stipulating that foreign laws do not apply in U.S. courts. Zia Sheikh, imam at the Islamic Center of Irving, told reporters at the time that Van Duyne's "whole point was to rile up her supporters. The problem is we become the whipping boys."

In the wake of last week's incident, Van Duyne defended Irving school officials and police for, as she euphemistically put it, "looking into what they saw as a potential threat." Attempting to justify the treatment of Ahmed, Van Duyne took to Facebook to say, "We have all seen terrible and violent acts committed in schools...Perhaps some of those could have been prevented and lives could have been spared if people were more vigilant."

Irving, formerly home to the Dallas Cowboys and currently home to ExxonMobil, is among the inner ring of suburban communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex that recently have seen a number of attacks on Muslims and other provocations.

Once a white-flight suburb, it has become increasingly diverse and a home to immigrant communities in recent years, with a white political establishment clinging to power and increasingly appealing to right-wing, racist ideas.

The Irving school district has the distinction of being one of Texas' most punitive in a state already notorious for its "zero tolerance" disciplinary practices. Unsurprisingly, there appears to be a racial dimension to the way the district metes out discipline. In a district with a 13 percent African American student population, Black students make up one quarter of all out-of-school suspensions.

While Irving police declined in the end to file criminal charges against Ahmed, his school upheld his suspension and sent a letter to students' families that doubled down on the talk of Ahmed's actions as "suspicious."

WHILE IT may be tempting to account for Ahmed's ordeal as a case of "Texas being Texas," it comes at a time when Islamophobic rhetoric and attacks on Muslims are on the rise everywhere--and are given both tacit and direct encouragement by the American political establishment.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald put it, what happened to Ahmed is "the natural, inevitable byproduct of the culture of fear and demonization that has festered and been continuously inflamed for many years."

That demonization was on full display the week of Ahmed's arrest among the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Stumping in New Hampshire, Donald Trump responded to a supporter who asked, "When can we get rid of [Muslims]?" by saying, "We are going to be looking at that and plenty of other things."

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, asked directly about Ahmed at a debate of the "second tier" GOP hopefuls, replied by saying, "I am worried about radical Islamic terrorists who are already here planning another 9/11. We are at war, folks."

Meanwhile, libertarian TV personality and professional bigot Bill Maher took to the airwaves to say that Ahmed's parents should explain to him that he was arrested because "in our religion, we were responsible for 9/11."

Despite the warm statements for Ahmed made by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic political establishment has contributed to this climate of bigotry by actively pursuing a "war on terror" that targets Muslims domestically and abroad. Some observers noted the hypocrisy of Obama's supportive tweet to Ahmed, given his support for drone strikes that have killed 204 children in Pakistan since 2004.

THE ONLY saving grace in Ahmed's horrible story is the groundswell of support for him that has come from across the country and the world, as supporters rallied to the #IStandWithAhmed campaign and posted pictures of themselves with clocks.

The response to his arrest was so overwhelming that even arch-conservative Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was compelled to remark that the police "may have gone too far," and that "the last thing we want to do is put handcuffs on a kid unjustifiably."

Beyond the statements of support from politicians and publicity-seeking CEOs like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, there was a sweet outpouring of nerd solidarity, with institutions from MIT to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory extending invitations for Ahmed to come for a visit. Students at the prestigious Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science posted a solidarity photo for Ahmed, and MIT students built and displayed a clock over a building entrance with an #IStandWithAhmed banner.

People across Texas also took political action in the wake of the incident. The liberal advocacy group Progress Texas circulated an online petition calling on Ahmed's school to apologize to him and lift his suspension, and held a press conference outside his school. At the University of Texas at Austin, students are planning a rally against racism and Islamophobia.

Ahmed himself seems to have been buoyed by this outpouring of solidarity, tweeting to his supporters, "Thank you for your support! I really didn't think people would care about a Muslim boy."

Two days after his arrest, Ahmed spoke movingly about his experience at a press conference, saying, "I never thought I'd get this far. But since I have gotten this far, I will try my best not to just help me, but to help every other kid in the entire world who has a problem like this."

That's the spirit of solidarity we need to build on in the face of all forms of bigotry.