Muhammad Ali’s global belovedness coexisted with his Muslim faith’s vilification

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. The biblical tales of a Black David defeating one Goliath after other Goliaths won Ali the adoration of billions around the world, and after he died on July 3, 2016, made him beloved all over the world. But it was his unshakable fidelity to his convictions, political and spiritual, that made him immortal. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1050