14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested when teachers mistook his homemade clock for a bomb...
We love a happy ending, even more so when it’s really a happy beginning.
Yesterday, the image of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed being arrested after his teachers mistook his homemade clock for a bomb went viral.
Within hours, the news had spread around the world and the headlines highlighted just how narrow-minded and disappointingly stereotypical the incident was:
‘US Muslim student arrested over “hoax-bomb” clock’
‘Muslim Boy Handcuffed Over Homemade Clock’
‘Ahmed Mohamed: 14-year-old Muslim student arrested for bringing homemade clock to school’
Ahmed, an aspiring engineer, had built his own clock over the weekend and took it into Irving MacArthur High School in North Texas on Monday morning to show his teacher.
‘He [the teacher] was like, “That's really nice. I would advise you not to show any other teachers,”’ Ahmed told Dallas Morning News.
His English teacher spotted the clock in his bag later that day and within hours Ahmed was escorted out of school in handcuffs, taken to a police station, fingerprinted and photographed.
The inventive kid said he was made to feel “like a criminal”. He was suspended from school for three days and threatened with expulsion.
However as the news of this injustice spread around the world, the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed started trending on Twitter and the ninth-grader was flooded with waves of support. He even got a message of support from President Obama.
‘Cool clock, Ahmed,’ tweeted the US President. ‘Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to be in science. It’s what makes America great.’
As well as an invite to The White House, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reached out to the Texan teen to pretty much offer him a job at the world’s leading social media platform.
‘The future belongs to people like Ahmed,’ Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post last night.
‘Ahmed, if you ever want to come by Facebook, I’d love to meet you.’
To top that off, which is really saying something, Ahmed was also invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by one of their top physicists who told him he was her “ideal student”.
Ahmed is still suspended from school but is planning to transfer. We’ve got a feeling he’s got a very bright future ahead of him.