Muhammad Ali’s Fight for Islam
By Julio Severo
In his final months, Muhammad Ali, who died Friday at
74, was promoting Islam, the religion he embraced in the 1960s.
“American Muslims would be well-served to look at the
challenges that Muslims such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali had to deal with,”
said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations.
Walid, who led prayers for Ali on Sunday at a Detroit
mosque Ali used to visit, remembers as a child in the 1970s he received a Ali
doll, which led to his eventual conversion to Islam.
Ali, originally a Baptist, renounced Christianity at 22
to become the most famous convert to Islam in American history when he
announced he had joined the Black Muslim movement under the guidance of Malcolm
X shortly after he first became champion. He eventually rejected his “white”
name, Cassius Clay, which he considered a “slave name,” and instead used the
name “Muhammad Ali,” bestowed upon him by Nation of Islam founder Elijah
Muhammad.
Ali’s emergence coincided with the American civil
rights movement and his persona offered young blacks an Islamic radical passion
they did not get from the Protestant minister Martin Luther King.
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize,” Ali
said. “But get used to me… my religion, not yours.”
Decisive for his Islamic propaganda was the U.S.
cultural hegemony, which makes any fame and propaganda global. Without it, he
would hardly have been, mistakenly, the greatest athlete of the century — in
the service of Islam. This hegemony has been an effective platform for Islamic
expansion.
In the past, this hegemony worked positively for
Christian expansion — the U.S. was the biggest champion of Protestant missions
in the world. But with the increasing U.S. moral decadence and a dramatic
reduction of conservative evangelicalism (the U.S. has gone from a 98%
Protestant population in the late 1700s to less than 50% today), it works now for
any ideology, including Islam.
One of Ali’s final messages was defending Islam. Trump’s
comments, Ali said, “alienated many from learning about Islam.”
He died at the age of 74 after suffering for more than
three decades with Parkinson’s syndrome, which has been linked to head trauma because
of his boxing career. This condition stole his physical strength and killed his
loquaciousness.
With
information from the Associated Press, Charisma magazine and Reuters.
Source: Last Days Watchman
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