Reversal of fortune

Life is looking up for the Muslim teen who was wrongly arrested for his home-made clock

Ahmed Mohamed is moving to Qatar, less than two months after being arrested for taking his home-made clock to his school in Texas. Jim Watson / AFP

Life has certainly become a lot better for Ahmed Mohamed than the day last month the 14-year-old was arrested by police, which mistook his home-made clock he took to his Texas high school for a bomb. As we report today, he and his family of Sudanese migrants are moving to Qatar, where he has been offered a full scholarship through to undergraduate level.

This caps a dramatic reversal of fortune since the photograph of him in handcuffs went viral. Ahmed has since been invited to the White House by Barack Obama and received messages of support from the chief executives of Facebook and Google.

But amid this good news, one has to ask if anything has changed in the US to prevent the next Ahmed from being treated similarly because their inventiveness and enterprise are misinterpreted by the authorities because of religion and ethnicity? While life is a lot better for Ahmed, failure to address the root cause of prejudice will ensure history unfortunately repeats for others like him.