—Moustafa Bayoumi
By now you’ve heard about Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Muslim-American kid from Texas who built a clock at home and brought it to school to show to his teacher, only to be arrested on the ridiculous suspicion that his invention was a bomb.
Young Ahmed was handcuffed, taken to police headquarters, fingerprinted and questioned without his parents present. During his interrogation, as The Washington Post reports, the officers repeatedly brought up his last name.
Here is an inventive Sudanese-American teenager in a NASA T-shirt whose curiosity and ingenuity are rewarded with handcuffs and punishment.
Things turned out well for Mohamed in the end — President Obama tweeted at him, and Mohamed is fielding invitations to visit MIT and Harvard.
Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.
— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015
But the national attention his absurd arrest has garnered is an exception. Most of the time, bigotry against Muslims goes unremarked upon or even gets rewarded.
The same week that Mohamed brought his clock to school, vandals spray-painted hate-filled messages on a mosque in Kentucky. Days earlier in a Chicago suburb, Inderjit Singh Mukker, a Sikh-American father of two, was repeatedly punched in the face while his attacker yelled, “Terrorist, go back to your country, bin Laden.” (Sikhs are often the victims of anti-Muslim hate crimes because of their beards, turbans and skin color.) On this year’s anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a Florida gun shop owner offered $25 off any gun purchased online with the coupon code “Muslim.”
In case you think anti-Muslim sentiment is limited to the fringes, consider this University of Connecticut study. Researchers there last year found that job applicants with identifiably Muslim names received “32 percent fewer e-mails and 48 percent fewer phone calls than applicants from the control group, far outweighing measurable bias against the other faith groups.”
Official agencies reflect these attitudes, too. The New York Police Department was caught spying a few years ago on every facet of Muslim life around the region. This was massive, expensive surveillance performed without even the hint of any criminal activity. And federal policies such as the Countering Violent Extremism initiative stigmatize Muslim-Americans as terrorists, even though the number of terrorist attacks that Muslim-Americans have committed are miniscule and far fewer than those that right-wing extremists have perpetrated.
Islamophobia infests our politics and our society. Republican presidential contender South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham supports the surveillance of mosques, while former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark recently proposed the reintroduction of internment camps for “radicalized Americans.” Muslims across the country regularly face opposition in constructing their houses of worship and are routinely demonized in the media.
What most Americans don’t realize is how exhausting it is to live a Muslim-American life in this environment. Many see anti-Muslim attitudes not as bigoted but as common sense. Ordinary things that Muslims do, such as cleverly making a clock at home to show off at school, can be interpreted as suspicious and threatening.
Islamophobia in the United States today is real and it’s growing. Like Ahmed Mohamed, we need to be inventive, and find solutions that will help our country live up to its ideals.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of This Muslim American Life (NYU Press, 2015), and How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Nonfiction. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY).
[This piece originally appeared in The Progressive.]
