Mohamed plans to take up summer internship with Twitter.
AB Wire
‘Clock Boy’ Ahmed Mohamed, the American Muslim teenager who made headlines last September when he was arrested and later suspended for bringing a homemade clock to MacArthur High School in Irving, has returned to the United States, after he got homesick in Qatar, where he had emigrated to after the incident made headlines globally .
“Ahmed and his family have missed his grandmother, his aunts, uncles, cousins and friends here in Irving and across North Texas very much,” a relative was quoted as saying by Fox News. “Ahmed and his nuclear family miss America and their whole family here in America very much.
Ahmed said Facebook, MIT and NASA have contacted him through social media, asking him to visit while he’s in the U.S. during the summer.
The 14-year-old said he’s happy to be back home, and seeing his friends and family is first priority. He’s been going to school in Qatar and says there’s a 50/50 chance he’ll finish high school in the U.S., but says he definitely wants to go to college here. He says he’s interested in coding, engineering and technology.
“I’ve matured more. It’s normal to mature but I’ve matured way more since I got a little bit of publicity, and I’m happy for it,” Ahmed told Fox News.
“It’s beautiful to be here in USA,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed. “It is our home and it is our country and we love it. As you see, if there is something wrong, America will stand for it and that is what happened. Something was happening to my son. Everybody has a heart, has children, Something is wrong, so they stood for it.”
The 14-year-old was arrested in September after Irving MacArthur High School faculty mistakenly thought the homemade digital clock he’d taken school was a bomb.
The subsequent fallout made international headlines. Ahmed was invited to visit the White House, participated in Google’s science fair and included in Time’s “Most Influential Teens of 2015” list. He and his immediately family ended up moving to Qatar, where a foundation offered to pay for his education.
The Dallas Morning News reported Ahmed as saying in an interview: “I want to help change Texas for a better state, and I hope that not just for Texas, but the entire world. People sometimes don’t want to admit their mistakes, and sometimes the best thing to do is to help them change.”
The amount of support he received through social media surprised him, Ahmed said.
He has received hateful comments as well, but he tries not to let negativity faze him. Online threats have made him nervous and the rest of his family tries to stay out of the spotlight, he said.
He will get a chance to thank some social media giants in person later this summer when he visits Facebook and Twitter headquarters. He has an offer for an internship at Twitter.
He said the first question he plans to ask is, “How did you start?”
“Seeing where they’re at now, they inspire me a lot because they always show how a small weekend project can turn into something big,” Ahmed said.
These days, Ahmed said, if he sees a negative comment on social media, he brushes it off.
“It’s very difficult for me to read it, so I just ignore it and I just walk past it,” Ahmed said. “Sometimes it gets to me, but I just choose to not let it get to me.”
Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, said he was happy to see a wide spectrum of support with the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed. He said the negativity is just one of life’s tests for his son.
“You can’t get honey without the sting of the bee,” Mohamed said. “That is why God changed everything to tell him that the road is open for you, so show us your invention. Show us because we know what you are going through.”
If he could change anything, Ahmed would have taken his clock to the White House when he met President Barack Obama in October, he said.
“It was amazing, and when I met him, he was a very kind guy,” Ahmed said. “It will be sad not to see him in office in a few months.”
Ahmed knows what he wants to accomplish next: finish school in Qatar, attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and double-major in physics and electrical engineering.
The biggest difference in education between Irving and Qatar is the pace of learning, he said. In Qatar, each topic is covered in six weeks, such as biology first and then chemistry, reported the News.
Qatar’s education incorporates learning the Quran and the history of Islam, which Ahmed said he enjoyed. He also visited Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, in Saudi Arabia with his family.
“I felt good being able to learn my religion because it wasn’t an opportunity I had here in the U.S.,” Ahmed said, citing costs and difficulty finding a private teacher. “It was easier because your religion was basically embedded inside the country.”
He missed family and friends in Texas and also the diversity of America in the people and the landscapes, he said. Ahmed recalled road trips to Florida where he’d see different types of geography, while Qatar is mostly desert.
“America is very diverse, and I see there’s many cultures that are widespread around the nation,” Ahmed said. “Over there it’s a Muslim country, but here it’s more diverse.”
His travels have sparked an interest in helping the world through technology, such as helping people in hard-to-reach places get medicine and electricity.
“There’s a lot of trouble going on around the world right now,” Ahmed said. “They don’t have the same amount of tools that we have, so their life span might be different.”
His next goal is to patent his inventions involving electricity and friction.
“I just want to invent,” Ahmed said. “I want to help the world a lot, and it would be amazing to see my creations in action.”
1 Comment
But he’s not even bright. All these offers are simply pity offers. Good ol Ahmed, playing the muzzie victim card. And really? Do we really want this kid learning the behind the wires of Twitter???