An Iranian Ph.D. candidate was traveling aboard a Greyhound bus from Texas to Missouri this month when he was forced by the driver to disembark. The reason? The academic believes it's because his name is Mohammad.
"The driver lady came to me and woke me up and asked for my ticket. I showed her my ticket on my phone. Seeing my name on the ticket, which is ‘Mohammad,’ she told me ‘Your ticket is not acceptable and since you don’t have a printed version of it, you have to leave the bus,’” Mohammad Reza Sardari posted on Facebook on Nov. 16.
"Then I found my printed ticket in my back pack and showed it to her," he continued in the post. "But again she asked me to leave the bus. I asked for the reason and she responded 'I don’t want to talk to you!'"
Sardari specializes in urban planning and transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. He also won a scholarship to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The academic was heading to present at a national transportation conference, organized by the Transportation Research Board when the incident occurred.
In a video posted by Sardari with his comments, he can be heard calmly asking for a reason while the driver insists he disembark, saying the police are coming.
“You're not going with me. I don't want to talk to you no more. You get off my bus. Police is helping you out. Don't worry, police is coming. You're not going with me,” the driver says in the clip.
As Sardari initially refused to leave the vehicle, some other passengers also became angry with him.
"It was a very scary situation,” he told NBC 5. "One of [the passengers] approached me at my seat and loudly said [the] ‘F-word’ and told me, ‘If you are not leaving the bus we want to do something with you here in the bus.’"
Sardari was eventually forced to leave the bus around 3:40 a.m. An employee for Greyhound at the station told him the next bus to his destination didn't depart until 2:30 p.m., six hours after his conference was set to start.
With no other options, Sardari paid $250 for a Lyft to travel the remaining 200 miles (322 km). He also decided to take a flight back home to Texas, not wanting any further problems with Greyhound.
Making it successfully to the conference, Sardari's presentation thankfully went off without a hitch. One of the attendees even said his panel "was one of the highlights of the conference."
The Iranian academic insists he isn't interested in any kind of reimbursement, he just wants people to be aware that the incident occurred. According to another Facebook post by Sardari, a crowdfunding page has been set up on his behalf but he does not want to receive any of the money.
"I have realized that a GOFUNDME page was set up for me!!! I just wanted to let you know that I don’t approve that page and I won’t accept any donations from it," he wrote.
When contacted by NBC 5, a spokesperson for Greyhound insisted that what Sardari experienced is unacceptable from the company's perspective.
"Greyhound does not tolerate discrimination of any kind and is taking these allegations very seriously," the spokesperson said. "We’ve identified the driver and are currently conducting a thorough investigation into the matter."
But Sardari's experience is only one of many, part of a disturbing uptick in discrimination and Islamophobia throughout the U.S. Hate crimes targeting Muslims rose an alarming 20 percent between 2015 and 2016, according to the FBI. A report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) earlier this year also shows that there was a 57 percent increase in incidents of anti-Muslim bias in 2016, compared to the previous year.
There have been numerous high-profile incidents of Muslims, both foreign nationals and Americans, being asked to leave planes and held by airport security for insignificant or no reason. Even prominent Muslim Americans such as Olympic athlete Ibtihaj Muhammad and the son of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali have faced discrimination while traveling.