Do you remember? A couple of years ago, Fandango used to publish this prompt every Sunday. I used to enjoy taking part, and tried to highlight news stories from the UK. At some point during the week, there was always someone or other who “won” the week, either literally or tongue-in-cheek.

I miss taking part in those posts, and now that I have some more time on my hands, I asked Fandango if I could revive them. So each Sunday evening I’m going to post some UK story which struck me as either admirable or totally crass. I’ll leave it to you to decide which.

Over here in Europe, we have a kinda restricted view of American politics. There’s one party to the right, and another party to the “further right”. And it’s only when you look beneath the surface that there’s more to it than that.

But as an approximation, that analogy works. And in Britain, we have sort-of followed suit. But over in France, say, it’s perfectly possible to vote for left-wing candidates, people who will openly stand as communists or socialists, say, and who will receive a reasonable amount of support.

So my head was turned, the other week, when I heard of this “Muslim firebrand” in America who was running for senate.

So much so that I noted his name and looked him up on Wikipedia.

I learned that he had a profile, for a start, which seemed to predate his political career. A life before politics. He has a PhD in public health, won a Rhodes scholarship, and was a noted epidemiologist.

Now, I know a little bit about Rhodes Scholarships. For a start, past scholars have included high-flyers as diverse as Bill Clinton, Wasim Sajjad (who was president of Pakistan), Edwin Hubble (who discovered that the universe is expanding), Howard Florey (who won a Nobel prize for his work discovering penicillin) and J. William Fulbright (a lawyer and senator who, at the time of the Vietnam war, was chair of the Foreign Relations committee, and a vocal opponent).

Competition for the Rhodes scholarship is strong, with only around a hundred being granted, worldwide, each year, and the reward is the opportunity to study, normally two or three years postgrad, at the prestigious University of Oxford.

Overall, if you’re awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, you’re among pretty select company.

So straight away, I’m thinking that this guy is overqualified, if anything, to be a US senator. And I’m left wondering why both the US and the UK media chose to describe Abdul El Sayed as “a Muslim” rather than “a Rhodes scholar”?

I mean, this guy is obviously a sharp cookie, so surely if you’re looking for a quick tag to place around someone’s neck, “Rhodes scholar” would give people a far better sense of who he is? You know, there are an estimated 2 billion Muslims on the planet, so if you describe someone as “Muslim”, all you’re really doing is saying he’s just like every 1 in 4 of us. It’s a pretty generic term, if you’re looking for a description, surely? Not really any more informative than “man” or “woman”.

Unless, of course, you want to play on the irrational fears many people in the West still have of the word “Muslim”?

Congratulations to Abdul El-Sayed, who defied the odds to become the senator-elect of Michigan. Let’s hope we’ve not heard the last of him.

What about you? Do you have a story, perhaps from your neck of the woods, that you’d like to share with us? If you’d like to join in, just tag it FWWTW (this was the original tag which will also help you find the old posts) and/or ping back to this post, so we can all read it.