Why some Muslims don't want Ahmed Mohamed's blackness to be ignored

Ahmed Mohamed is now a 14-year-old with a national following and a long list of powerful people on his calling card.

After he was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school to impress his teachers, the ninth-grader has become symbolic of the worst skeletons in America's closet: growing hysteria and over-criminalization in American schools, Islamophobia and racism.

As the news of Mohamed's plight spread, some of the earliest accounts associated the teen, who is of Sudanese descent, with the word "brown," a fuzzy bit of racial jargon that typically refers to non-black people of South Asian or sometimes Latin American descent.

And others openly wondered how the world might have reacted to Mohamed's story if he had been black.

PHOTO GALLERY: Arrested for making a clock, teen Ahmed Mohamed is America's new hero

But Mohamed's racial identity is as complex as the country of his descent. The African nation of Sudan is predominantly Muslim and comprises some 600 ethnicities. Arabs and indigenous Africans have intermarried and mixed there for centuries and most speak Arabic.

To wit, the phrase given to the region now inhabited by Islamic people in Africa, which includes modern-day Sudan, is "Bilad al-Sudan" and it means literally "the land of negroes" or "the land of blacks."

Further complicating the situation is the fact that high-profile praise came from such figures as Indian American comedian Aziz Ansari, who compared his own experience to Mohamed's.

"#IStandWithAhmed cause I was once a brown kid in the south too," Ansari wrote on Twitter.

Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur of Indian descent, who was among the first to publicize Mohamed's story to his more than half-a-million followers, told The Washington Post that he was struck by the teen's story simply because he saw himself in the "skinny brown kid."

"My identification was literally: I physically looked similar. I had the same glasses and I was skinny. It was on a purely physical level," Dash acknowledged.

Dash reached out to Mohamed's family and counseled them on how to cope with the impending deluge of media attention. He cautioned them to change their passwords, create a Twitter account. Dash was the first to tweet out the now-infamous photo of Mohamed handcuffed in his faded NASA T-shirt.

But Dash said that he actually doesn't know whether Mohamed or his family identify as black. But they have been clear from the beginning that their religious identity is an important - if not the most important - factor in the 14-year-old's treatment by the school and police.