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 "We thank God for him," Talib Shareef, president and imam of
the Masjid Muhammad mosque in Washington, told a gathering of
Muslim leaders who honored Ali in Washington on Saturday, a day
after he died in a Phoenix hospital at age 74. "America should
thank God for him. He was an American hero."
From the turmoil of civil rights and black Muslim movements of
the 1960s to the darkest days after Sept. 11, 2001, Ali was a
hero that U.S. Muslims could share with part of the American
mainstream.
Muslims remembered Ali for many familiar reasons, hailing him as
a champion of social justice, a lifelong supporter of charitable
works and an opponent of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
Moreover, they said, he was a Muslim that a largely Christian
country came to admire, even if Ali shocked and scared much of
U.S. society after he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his
name from Cassius Clay in 1964.
"When we look at the history of the African-American community,
one important factor in popularizing Islam in America is
Muhammad Ali," Warith Deen Mohammed II, son of the former Nation
of Islam leader, said in a statement.
With some 3.3 million adherents in the United States, Muslims
make up about 1 percent of the population, largely immigrants
and African-Americans who have embraced the religion.
Although they have integrated into society better than some of
their brethren in Europe, American Muslims face hardships even
as the United State grows demographically less white and less
Christian.
Since 2001, they have suffered backlash from those Americans who
equate all Muslims with those who have attacked civilians out of
some jihadist cause.
Decades before, black Muslim leaders such as Elijah Muhammad and
Malcolm X rattled the white establishment as religious and
ethnic minorities who demanded equality for their people. Elijah
Mohammad preached a version that denounced white oppression and
opposed integration of the races.
Ali came to be widely revered, but there was a time when he was
rejected, mostly by whites by also by some black leaders for his
bold statements against white supremacy and for his refusal to
embrace the model epitomized by Martin Luther King, a Christian.
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"The sanitizing of Ali's image in recent years has led many to
forget that he was reviled by many during the 1960s for his
conversion to Islam and for his refusal to be inducted into the U.S.
armed forces," said Frank Guridy, a visiting associate professor of
history at Columbia University.
"He was seen as a traitor to the United States of America."
In the 1970s, Ali converted to Sunni Islam, the largest denomination
among Muslims worldwide, and embraced Sufism, a mystical school of
the faith.
At the gathering of Muslim-American leaders in Washington, speaker
after speaker remembered him fondly as the Muslim who Americans came
to love.
Ali defended Muslims last December, after Republican presidential
hopeful Donald Trump proposed temporarily stopping Muslims from
entering the country in the wake of Islamist militant attacks in
Paris and San Bernardino, California.
"Our political leaders should use their position to bring
understanding about the religion of Islam, and clarify that these
misguided murderers have perverted people's views on what Islam
really is," Ali said in a statement.
He also used his influence to advocate the release of Jason Rezaian,
a Washington Post reporter who spent 18 months in a Iranian prison,
and for Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was
captured by Islamic extremists in Pakistan and later beheaded in
2002.
"Muhammad Ali was a gift from God," said Nihad Awad, executive
director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, "not only to
Muslims but to the world."
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta in New York and Alex Dobuzinskis in Los
Angeles; Additional reporting by Frank McGurty; Editing by Jeffrey
Benkoe)
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