A mayor’s anti-sharia politics influenced teachers’ treatment of a Muslim student

Evidence

Another example of growing anti-Muslim sentiments, in the DFW area, can be seen in the case of Ahmed Mohamed. In 2015, Ahmed Mohamed, a fourteen-year-old high school student in Irving, Texas, built a clock and took it to school. His teachers accused him of building a bomb and subsequently called the police and had him arrested (Fantz et al. 2015). It is not surprising that the teachers in the Irving school responded to Ahmed as they did, given the political views of their mayor, Beth Van Duye—a staunch supporter of anti-sharia legislation in Texas. To provide a bit of context, in Texas, a sharia tribunal was set up to deal with family and business feuds in the Muslim community, similar to Jewish and Catholic tribunals that have existed without any interference from local politicians. While sharia tribunals are voluntary and Muslims can choose to use U.S. courts instead, Mayor Duye publicly stated she would never allow such tribunals and expressed her support for HB 562, an anti-sharia bill introduced to the Texas State Senate (Shehata 2015). — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 118

Categorization

• XREF: The sharia tribunal parallel with Jewish and Catholic tribunals connects cleanly to the religious-arbitration material already in the library (Bernstein on religious arbitration, Opting Out).
• SEED: Angle: the mainstream political acceptance of Jewish and Catholic religious tribunals versus the manufactured panic over identical Muslim tribunals is a sharp, defensible essay.
• QUESTION: Is there systematic evidence that the Ahmed Mohamed arrest was policy-driven, or was Van Duye’s influence more ambient?