Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, shown on video assaulting Shohel Mahmud after he began reciting prayer in Arabic
A New York woman who pepper-sprayed a Muslim Uber driver while he was praying has been indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on hate crime charges.
Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, is shown in a surveillance video repeatedly pepper-spraying her Uber driver, Shohel Mahmud. The assault took place in August on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, near the corner of east 65th Street and Lexington Avenue, shortly after Mahmud began reciting a prayer in Arabic.
…
Guilbeault’s former employer, the public relations and marketing firm D Pagan Communications, wrote on X it is aware of her actions and “don’t condone this behavior”.
If it were silent prayer they wouldn’t have known he was doing it unless his hands were off the wheel while driving, which would be concerning in its own right.
Randomly praying in private is fine. Praying on the job in the middle of the task you are paid for is fucking weird and bad. It’s an Uber driver. Fares are very rarely over 30 minutes and probably more commonly less. Pray in between. There is no doctrine mandating it at such an interval that it would interfere with this work in a way that would require special allowances. IN FACT, there are special allowances within the religion that permit not adhering to the 5 prayer routine during acts of travel or when it could be deemed unsafe, all of which would apply to the act of driving.
But why? What if this dude feels personally called to speak with god for several hours a day? I’d consider Uber a fairly adaptable job that works for that.
There’s a difference between weird and bad. Is it weird to pray aloud in front of others? A little, I guess, but that’s not a reason that he shouldn’t do it and it doesn’t make it bad.
If that’s their compulsion they can do it while not actively working. In between pickups etc. I personally find it obnoxiously pious to make others unwilling participants in your praying. A person’s driver is in too intimate a setting to be doing stuff like that.
I wouldn’t give a shit if they were a bus driver though because that’s already a more public environment where I’m not expecting the driver to be talking to me if they are talking. (I also find it annoying when the driver is on the phone in an Uber for similar reasons). If they were being annoying I have the ability to move myself a little further out of earshot. In a private car, the only way to avoid it is to end the ride and find a new one, which would be incredibly inconvenient.
They can legally also do it while working, though. It’s their car and they’re not an employee, so Uber certainly can’t tell them not to. I guess I don’t really see what you’re trying to say: do you want him to not be allowed to pray while working, or do you just think it’s a dick move? If the latter, do you think it’s reasonable to pepper spray him for it?
I’ve got misophonia, and sometimes people make sounds that make me super uncomfortable. In an Uber- style situation, I tend to just politely ask them not to (unless it’s a breathing sound, in which case I just try to distract myself)), which has never not worked.
I just think it’s a dick move, and as already stated explicitly by me, they should not be pepper sprayed or attacked in any way. This is a “playing music out loud on a bus” level of annoyance.