Hour of Ahmed

A school-player has become the main hero of the struggle against Islamophobia in the United States

On September 15, an American schoolboy named Ahmed Muhamed was removed from classes, detained and interrogated because of home-made hours-at school and the police decided that the teenager had gathered a bomb dummy. The media learned about the history, and Muhamed quickly became the main hero of the news: the largest IT companies and the US President Barack Obama himself called the inventive schoolboy.

Bomb from films

The 14-year-old Ahmed Mukhamed from the Texas city of Irving is actively fond of electrical engineering, collects his own radio and independently repair his racing cards. His father, Makhamed Elhasan Muhamed, who transported his family from Sudan, tells reporters that the teenager was repaired his phone, computer and even car. The student’s room due to the abundance of radio components resembles a warehouse of the electronics store.

In high school, Ahmed loved to go to the Robotics club. In 2015, he moved to high school and began to look for something similar for himself. Since none of the new teachers knew about the hobbies of the teenager, he decided to collect something and demonstrate it at school.

On Sunday, before going to bed, Ahmed gathered hours in 20 minutes - connected a fee and a battery to the screen, and placed the entire structure in a suitcase with a hologram of the tiger applied to it. The next morning, he brought the clock to school and showed them to the labor teacher. He said: “This is very nice. I advise you not to show them to other teachers. "

The schoolboy obeyed, hid the suitcase in the backpack and went to the English lesson. But in the middle of the lesson, the alarm clock in the clock was squealing, and the teacher demanded to show her craft. Seeing a suitcase with wires, she said that he looks like a bomb. Ahmed replied: "For me, he does not look like a bomb."

The teacher took the clock from Ahmed, and after some time the school principal and police officer entered the classroom and brought the schoolboy. They took him to the office, where there were four more police officers. One of them (Ahmed had never seen him before), seeing a teenager, leaned back in an armchair and said “Yeah. This is the one I thought about. "

The police began to search the schoolboy and interrogate about his intentions. They were sure that Ahmed tried to make a bomb. On his statement that he did the clock, he was told: "As for me, it looks like a bomb from the films." The school principal threatened to exclude the teenager if he did not write a recognition.

Then Ahmed was handed over to the handcuffs (as later explained to the police, “for the sake of the safety of a boy and police”), led out of school and taken to the department for young offenders. There they removed fingerprints from the teenager, after which they handed over to their parents.

"Suspicious subject"

On Wednesday, when the media and social networks were already boiling due to the arrest of a boy from a Muslim family for a home-made hours, the head of the Irving police, Larry Boyd, gave a press conference. He announced that no accusations would be charged to the student.

“The subsequent investigation showed that the device was supposed to be a home experiment, and there is no evidence confirming that he was going to raise the alarm,” Boyd said. Despite this, the police chief himself called the clock "unconditionally suspicious in essence."

The incident, according to Boyd, is a "naive incident." He rejected the connection of the detention of a teenager with his religion - the policeman assured the journalists that a similar reaction would follow under any other circumstances. “We live in an era where you can’t just take and bring such things to school,” he added, citing incidents that were previously taking place in American schools.

The school director the day after the incident sent a letter to his parents in which there were no apologies: instead he told how the police investigated the appearance of a potentially dangerous subject (home -made hours) at the school, and also advised adults to talk with the child that it was unacceptable to bring prohibited things to the educational institution.

In support of the actions of the school and the police, the mayor of Irving Beth Van Dain also spoke. In Facebook, she wrote that vigilance allowed Irving to “be one of the safest cities in the country.” True, later Van Dain edited her post, adding that she had something like this with her child, she would “be very outraged”.

Ahmed's father Mahamed Elhasan Muhamed told reporters that he was proud of his son. “He just wants to create good things for humanity, but since his name is Muhamed and because of the attack on September 11, my son was inappropriate,” the man said.

Invitation to the White House

Prior to this incident, Ahmed did not use social networks, but the older sisters opened his twitter. In one of the first tweets, the teenager thanked everyone for his support. “I did not think that people would deal with a Muslim boy,” he wrote.

Ahmed account is called @Sistandwithahmed - "I am for Ahmed." The same hashtag was used by people when they wrote the words of support to the student.

In addition to ordinary users, the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the situation. “For the skill and desire to create something cool, you need to applaud, not arrest,” he wrote on his page. “The future belongs like Ahmed.” Tsuckerberg also invited the student to meet in the Facebook office if he wishes him.

Muhamed has a rich choice : he was already called to a scientific competition for schoolchildren Google Science Fair, astronaut Chris Hadfield - on a scientific show in Toronto, Twitter and Reddit - for an internship, and the general director of the BOX project Aaron Levy - to the company's office. Autodesk general director of Autodesk (developer of the 3DS Max program) Karl Bass and the co -founder of the Andreessen Horowitz Venture Fund supported Mark Andressen, as well as scientists , including from NASA (on the day the schoolchildren was a T -shirt with a space agency logo) International.

Finally, US President Barack Obama invited Ahmed to bring his clock to the White House. As specified in the press service of the head of state, we are talking about an invitation to the evening of astronomy. The schoolboy has already agreed to visit the president.

The American media also spoke in support of Ahmed. The Daily Dot entertainment made a selection of hours “7 real bombs, which are definitely bombs, not for hours”, and also collected instructions for creating hours at home.

The VOX publication released the column “The matter is not only in Ahmed Muhamede: anti-Islamic fanaticism in America got out of control”, which contains other examples of vivid Islamophobia, as well as the analysis of the same photo with a schoolboy in the NASA T-shirt and in handcuffs. Its author indicates that America, on the one hand, is trying to prove its peacefulness to the Islamic world, experiences difficulties with the quality of mathematical and scientific education and needs talented immigrants, and on the other hand, it humiliates a talented Islamic boy due to the fact that teachers cannot distinguish the hours from the bomb.

“But the most heartbreaking part of this picture is Muhamed's face. It was assumed that America would be better. But on Monday, his school and local police - public institutions, whose work is paid by his family taxes - brought him in a terrible, traumatic way, ”the article says.

Ahmed Muhamed was removed from school for three days. But the boy is not going to return: he is already looking for another school. After release, he is going to enter the Massachusetts Technological Institute.

Sultan Suleimanov