On Monday at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed stuffed his metal pencil box with electronic circuitry and a digital clock face and brought it to show his engineering teacher. The response was not what the boy was hoping for, as he was advised not to show any one else. However, the clock kept beeping in another class, forcing him to show the teacher who thought it looked like a bomb and so reported it to the principal. Police were summoned to the school, and after an interrogation, led the boy away in handcuffs to the juvenile detention center.

A Dallas News report states that Mohamed tinkers with electronics, making radios with parts scattered around his "Radio Shack backroom" bedroom. In middle school, he was in the robotics club and wanted to be a part of something similar now that he has entered high school. Quickly throwing his latest creation together in 20 minutes on Sunday, he thought this might be just the thing to get the attention of his engineering teacher.

But instead, Mohamed was led into a room and was searched and questioned by four police officers. They said it looked like "a movie bomb" to them, but the boy denied it, saying it was just a clock. Dallas News says that police were skeptical and felt they weren't getting the whole story.

"We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” police spokesman James McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”

“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car," he added. "The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”

The school suspended Mohamed and will likely face the wrath of the Council on American-Islamic Relations who are already citing Islamophobia. Mohamed's father is angry and told the paper, "He just wants to invent good things for mankind, but because his name is Mohamed and because of September 11, I think my son got mistreated." It is being reported that the father was not contacted before police arrived at the school.

Mohamed's father is Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, a legal Sudan immigrant, whose name appeared in news reports a few years back when pastor Terry Jones was holding a Quran burning at his church in Florida. Mr. Mohamed traveled to the church at their invite to offer a defense of the Islamic holy text in a mock trial they had set up. Mohamed identifies as a Sufi Muslim, often described as a more mystical take on the text and one that is very controversial to traditional Muslims.

This "proud defender of the Holy Quran" is also very political in his home country. He ran against Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir in 2010. According to other reports, he often wears flowing white robes similar to Muslim clerics, calls himself a sheik, and claims to have hundreds of followers in Sudan, Egypt, and the United States.

A video posted by Dallas News to YouTube shows Ahmed Mohamed explaining what happened at his school:

And as is customary these days, this incident now comes with its own hashtag, #IStandWithAhmed, and it has taken Twitter by storm with folks from all around defending the boy against his treatment:

As this story was being readied for publishing, an update came across the wire. A school spokeswoman spoke to the press and said some of the facts regarding this incident have been misreported and said all actions taken were because the school's only priority is keeping its students safe. If anything seems suspicious to a teacher, they are required to report it, the woman said.

She also added that pictures of Mohamed with different electronic devices that have been shared on social media do not match the clock he brought to school. Police released a photo of the actual device in hopes to make it more obvious as to why the school took such extreme actions as it did.