What ever happened to Ahmed Mohamed? For those who weren’t paying attention to the news in late 2015, headlines were dominated by the story of the “clock kid” and the circumstances surrounding his arrest. Ahmed Mohamed was a Muslim 14-year-old high school student who brought a homemade clock that he had constructed in a briefcase to school, and in doing so sparked a heated debate about Islamophobia in America.
Ahmed constructed a clock at home and brought it to school on September 14 to show it to his teachers and classmates. When the clock began to beep in class his teacher confiscated it and reported it to the principal. Ahmed was taken out of class by a police officer, was questioned by four officers in the school and was finally lead away in handcuffs. The media jumped on it as a prime case of Islamophobia and blamed the school and police force for the excessive response to such a harmless situation. Many people also commented on the fact that the school was not evacuated yet Ahmed was still arrested, and concluded this was evidence the school knew the device was just a clock and still acted as if he was a dangerous criminal. The school claimed to have no bias and acted as they always would in the case of a bomb hoax.
At first the loudest voices expressed outrage and disgust at the incident. Close to one million people used the hashtag #IstandwithAhmed within 24 hours of the story breaking. Local school administrators and Ahmed’s arresting officers received threats for their part in the arrest. Several congressmen signed a letter to the attorney general asking for an investigation into potential civil rights violations and ethnic profiling in his arrest. He was contacted by Mark Zuckerberg and was offered internship opportunities at Google and Twitter. Even President Obama sent a tweet to show his support for the student.
However, some people started to question the story of the inventor genius being profiled for his religion. This article gained traction shortly after the incident and claims the the clock was not an invention, but really a deconstructed digital clock mounted in a briefcase. The author uses this and other conjectures to question if Ahmed intended the device to be a hoax bomb by mounting a suspicious digital display inside a briefcase. Real Time host Bill Maher backed this view, saying on his show that the device “looked exactly like a bomb” and commented that Mohamed’s device being called an invention was akin to “pouring milk on a bowl of Cheerios and claiming you invented cereal.”
In spite of the criticism, Ahmed enjoyed a brief period of celebrity status following the arrest. He was invited to the White House to meet President Obama, went to Google headquarters and made numerous media appearances and television interviews. However his parents pulled him out of school in October of that year, claiming that he was experiencing emotional problems and having sleeping issues from the incident. The Mohamed family moved to Qatar in November, and shortly afterward announced the intention to sue to school, police force and mayor for $15 million in damages.
This new revelation set off alarm bells in the minds of the former doubters. Author Richard Dawkins took to Twitter, saying “Don't call him ‘clock boy’ since he never made a clock. Hoax Boy, having hoaxed his way into the White House, now wants $15M in addition!” and went on to compare Ahmed to child terrorists in ISIS. This conspiracy video received hundreds of thousands of views and over 20,000 likes, demonstrating that many people believe this narrative and believe the kid purposefully created the situation in order to profit off the controversy.
The clock Ahmed made could clearly be confused for a Hollywood-type fake bomb. He claimed it was an accident and it was called a bomb because of profiling, but others argue he knew what he was doing and intended to create a disturbance with a fake bomb. Regardless of his intentions, we are still looking at a case where a 14-year-old kid was led out of his school in handcuffs and treated like a criminal after bringing a harmless toy that he showed to his teacher immediately and did not pass off as anything other than a clock. This teenager was profiled by the police and his school, and continues to be judged by the public for benefiting from his ordeal.
The world has changed in the six months since Ahmed Mohamed’s arrest. Since then we have experienced terror attacks in Paris and Brussels and a mass shooting by Islamic extremists in San Bernardino, CA. Islamophobia is alive and well to the point where Donald Trump can make statements about the need to monitor Muslim Americans, saying “You have people that have to be tracked. If they’re Muslims, they’re Muslims”, and he is still the front-runner for the Republican Party. The fear and bigotry that caused Ahmed Mohamed’s arrest is worse than ever and we need to remember the outrage we felt back then. His arrest was one of the first times that the public was able to acknowledge the innocence of an Muslim and came together to express outrage at his unjust accusations. He represented that we can view Muslim Americans as akin to ourselves. So next time a politician steps up to promote fear and bigotry, we need to remember the 14-year-old American in handcuffs because he made a cool device.
