So... kid with an Arabic name, whose father is a belligerent Islamist known to the townspeople to rail against imagined anti-Muslim racists in the town square, shows up at school with a homemade electronic device with a timer on the front of it. He takes someone's bad advice to conceal it under his clothing, and walks into a classroom where it starts beeping.
I think reasonable people can understand why the police might have been called.
It was of course unreasonable for the police to have actually arrested the boy, once they found out what they were dealing with. Reading between the lines though, maybe the article's use of "arrested" just means they took the kid home to his parents.
The father is an anti-Islamist. Anti. It means opposite. The guy is sufficiently anti-Islamist to go run for president of Sudan. That takes some dedication.
Muslim != Islamist, just as Christian != Westboro Baptist.
The article said the father is outspoken against (presumably imaginary) anti-Islamic policies.
You may not know this, but Sudan is ruled by its Muslim, Arab north and is often quite happy to enslave or murder the black Christians in its south. Hardly a model of an anti-Islamist republic.
I'm not sure what kind of policies he's outspoken against, but if someone is against policies that they perceive to be hostile to Muslims, how does that make them Islamists who want to establish Islamic rule?
He is a Sufi (mystic, esoteric) and more than a bit eccentric. I saw his brand of Islam described as "New Testament" elsewhere. He has tried to argue (contrary to most Islamic scholarship) that the earlier peaceful Meccan sections actually abrogate the later warlike Medinan sections of the Quran. I don't think he's any sort of Islamist at all.
"He says he has serious issues with the hardline, traditional readings of the text, and he's writing a book about his reading of the Koran -- with working titles like Jesus Among Us With the Quran, or The New Understanding of the Quran."
I think reasonable people can understand why the police might have been called.
It was of course unreasonable for the police to have actually arrested the boy, once they found out what they were dealing with. Reading between the lines though, maybe the article's use of "arrested" just means they took the kid home to his parents.