Beloved athletes can embody a despised religion without losing public adoration

Evidence

It is one of history’s greatest ironies that one of the world’s most beloved men also belonged to its most despised religion. But for Muhammad Ali, a fighter who scaled the tallest odds to claim victory in the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, and who had faced a more formidable foe, the American military, in the Supreme Court years earlier, what others thought seldom mattered. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1050

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s theme of Muslims’ global standing: Ali as the counter-example to Islamophobia, a beloved public Muslim.