It is terrifying out there: It is dark and getting darker. It can be past the bedtime for some nonadults in this country, starting with a few in Irving, Texas, who arrested Ahmed, a young schoolboy, for bringing a homemade digital clock to school to impress his engineering teacher. Mistaking the clock for a bomb, they had the ninth-grader handcuffed, interrogated by police officers who denied him the right to call his father and took him to a juvenile detention center to be fingerprinted. His innocent enterprise, a tradition in schools across the U.S., was met by suspicious adults in need of a nap. Most believe his Muslim name and his skin color caused the incident.
Other nonadults, unsupervised and acting out, have included a few of the Republican candidates eyeing the White House: During the second GOP debate, the candidates insulted women, immigrants, Muslims and gays while making up numbers and lies. They promised to build walls between us and Mexico and round up 11 million undocumented immigrants to be deported. In between, they competed with each other to mock the U.S. president and foreign leaders and threatened to send troops to Syria and invade Iran.
Days later, in a town hall in New Hampshire, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump promised to be “looking at that,” after being told Muslims were “a problem in this country” and that “we have training camps growing where they want to kill us.” Days later, Ben Carson stated no Muslim should be a president of the U.S.
Trump and Carson would be disappointed to learn the U.S. Constitution — the same document they and their supporters find, at times, annoyingly inconvenient — protects all Americans, including Muslims, and there are no religious tests required to be a president. They might as well rethink their plans to round up and expel 11 million undocumented immigrants, too, because the previous models of removal and forced relocations in America — the Trail of Tears and the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II, for instance — are not the best examples to follow. But as the election season approaches, logic and thoughtful ideas offered by the Republican candidates seem to suffer and shrink just as the daylight is.
Whether it is Islamophobia, paranoia or mistrust and fear of everything different, the question remains the same: How did we as a nation get here? Whatever happened to the cherished American values of religious freedom, tolerance, and civil discourse? Where are the voices of the moderate Republicans when it comes to such public bigotry?
It helps to note not all American Muslims arrived here as immigrants; many are the descendants of the enslaved Africans brought here in chains. Islam is an American religion, for it has been present, in one shape or another, in this land since the 14th or 15th century. Muslim Americans fought in the War of 1812 and the Civil War. From 1788 to 1789, President George Washington exchanged letters with the King of Morocco, an early ally of the young republic. In Arlington National Cemetery, the graves of fallen Muslim soldiers showcase the ultimate sacrifice of American Muslims for their country.
But prejudice continues: In Maine, as the new school year started, an angry parent called a university staff member to demand a change in his son’s dorm living situation because the roommate’s first name was Mohamed.
It is possible Ahmed’s clock contained a deeper meaning: that our national clock could be broken, that it tends to go backward and that it’s in need of urgent repair. How else to explain the level of sexism, racism, religious bigotry, homophobia and the rejection of science — in the case of climate change and vaccination — being publicly expressed by most of the candidates during the second GOP debate?
Now that Ahmed and his clock, along with the GOP frontrunners, have forced many of us to see ourselves as being capable of intolerance and bigotry and a return to the bygone era of religious, racial and ethnic hatred, he, having the skills, could do us a favor and build a compass: We might need it to find our way back to what America stands for.
But first, what time is it, Ahmed? It is scary. For many of us, it is awfully dark out there.
Reza Jalali has taught courses on Islam and Muslims in America at the Bangor Theological Seminary and the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of “Homesick Mosque and Other Stories” and “The Poets and the Assassin,” a play about women in Iran and Islam.