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muhammad ali
Zohran Mamdani and the Long Muslim Thread in the American Story
America is not a Christian nation, nor a nation for whites, nor a nation for the rich alone. It is a nation built on principles shared by all who live in it, and Islam has always been part of that inheritance.
Jan 02, 2026
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” —Frederick Douglass
America’s story has always been a story of struggle—for liberty, for justice, for recognition. On a cold January afternoon outside City Hall, Zohran Mamdani stepped into that struggle. Raising his right hand, he took the oath of office as mayor of New York City—the first Muslim ever to hold the city’s highest office—embodying Douglass’ truth: Progress demands courage, perseverance, and the relentless pursuit of inclusion.
The headlines captured the surface: a 25-minute inaugural address, roughly 4,000 spectators, a private swearing in just after midnight at the Old City Hall subway station, appearances by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). But the moment ran far deeper. Mamdani’s inauguration was not only a municipal milestone; it was the latest chapter in a debate as old as the republic itself: where Muslims belong in the American story—and whether they ever truly have.
That question stretches back to July 30, 1788, when North Carolina ratified the Constitution. Anti-federalist William Lancaster warned that by rejecting religious tests for office, the new nation might allow Muslims to govern. “Papists may occupy that chair,” he cautioned, “and Mahometans may take it. I see nothing against it.” A warning, then. A prophecy, now.
When Mamdani declared, “New York belongs to all who live in it,” he answered a question first posed in fear in 1788, tested in war, dramatized by Muhammad Ali, and deferred for generations.
There were no Muslim candidates in 1788. But there were Muslims in America—thousands of enslaved Africans whose presence exposed the republic’s deepest contradiction. Between 5 and 20% of enslaved Africans were Muslim, many literate in Arabic, bearing names like Fatima, Ali, Hassan, and Said. Their faith was violently suppressed, yet fragments endured—in memory, language, and resistance.
Even the founding generation reflected this tension. Thomas Jefferson studied the Quran and treated Islam as a serious intellectual tradition, even as he owned enslaved Muslims. Islam existed in theory, in human reality, and yet was denied civic recognition.
That tension carried forward into the nation’s greatest moral reckoning: the Civil War.
Muslims fought for the Union. Mohammed Kahn enlisted in the 43rd New York Infantry. Nicholas Said—born Mohammed Ali ben Said in Nigeria, raised Muslim, later converted to Christianity—served as a sergeant in the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment and as a Union clerk. Captain Moses Osman held a high-ranking post in the 104th Illinois Infantry. Union rosters show names like Ali, Hassan, and Said, hinting at a wider Muslim presence than history often acknowledges.
Yet rifles were not the only weapons. Islam entered the moral imagination through words and witness. Sen. Charles Sumner, nearly beaten on the Senate floor, quoted the Quran to condemn slavery. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo—Job ben Solomon—had already unsettled transatlantic assumptions through literacy, eloquence, and dignity. His story endured into the Civil War, republished in 1864 to reinforce the war’s moral purpose. Overseas, Hussein Pasha of Tunisia urged the US to abolish slavery “in the name of humanity,” showing Muslim advocacy was part of a global ethical conversation.
Muslims remained largely invisible in America’s public self-understanding—until the 20th century produced a figure too large to ignore.
Muhammad Ali, still the most recognizable man on Earth decades after his gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, transformed boxing and American consciousness alike. He was named “Athlete of the Century” by Sports Illustrated, GQ, and the BBC; “Kentuckian of the Century” by his home state; and became a global icon through speed, grace, and audacious charm.
Ali’s significance extended far beyond the ring. By insisting on the name Muhammad Ali instead of Cassius Clay, he forced America to confront the legacy of slavery embedded in naming itself. His embrace of Islam was unapologetic and public. His refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War cost him his title and livelihood, yet anticipated the anti-war movement. His fights in Kinshasa, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur shifted attention from superpower dominance toward global conscience.
Ali’s humanitarian work was relentless: delivering over 232 million meals, medical supplies to children in Jakarta, orphans in Liberia, street children in Morocco. At home, he visited soup kitchens, hospitals, advocated for children’s protections, and taught tolerance in schools through his book Healing. For this, he was honored as a United Nations Messenger of Peace, cited by Amnesty International, and recognized by President Jimmy Carter as “Mr. International Friendship.”
Ali showed the nation something fundamental: that Islam is American. That Muslims have always belonged to the moral and civic fabric of this country. That a nation built on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, on religious tolerance, on care for the poor, is naturally aligned with Islam. Mamdani is American not in spite of his faith, but because Islam is American.
It is against this long arc—from slavery to abolition, civil rights, global conscience, and the moral courage of Muhammad Ali—that Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration comes into focus.
Mamdani’s life traces modern routes of migration and belonging. Born in Kampala, Uganda to parents with roots in South Asia, he was raised in New York City. Yet his rise fulfills an older constitutional promise. In his inaugural address, he thanked his parents—“Mama and Baba”—acknowledged family “from Kampala to Delhi,” and recalled taking his oath of American citizenship on Pearl Street.
When Mamdani declared, “New York belongs to all who live in it,” he answered a question first posed in fear in 1788, tested in war, dramatized by Muhammad Ali, and deferred for generations. He named mosques alongside churches, synagogues, temples, gurdwaras, and mandirs, making visible what history had long rendered partial. When he spoke of halal cart vendors, Palestinian New Yorkers, Black homeowners, and immigrant families bound together by labor and hope, he articulated a civic vision rooted in lived American reality.
Notably, Mamdani did not frame his Muslim identity as something to defend. It simply existed. “Where else,” he asked, “could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox every Sunday?” Hybridity was not an exception. It was inheritance.
Yet it is equally important to recognize that Mamdani’s historic victory does not make him infallible, nor should it. The fact that he is the first Muslim mayor of New York City is not a personal achievement alone—it reflects the barriers that Muslims, like many others, have historically faced in participating fully in American democracy. Discrimination, racial and religious bias, and systemic obstacles made this moment possible only now, not because of any failing on his part. He will, like all mayors before him, make mistakes. He will face limits, criticism, and flaws—because he is human. To hold him to an impossible standard would be to misunderstand both history and democracy.
There is, too, something unmistakably American about Mamdani’s politics. By invoking La Guardia, Dinkins, and de Blasio; by embracing democratic socialism without apology; by grounding his agenda in labor, affordability, and collective responsibility, he situates himself firmly in an American tradition—one that echoes the abolitionists, the New Deal, and the moral courage of Ali.
And as Malcolm X reminds us, this is the guiding principle for American civic life: “I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in forcing anyone to accept it.”
This is what makes the moment historic. Not that a Muslim has finally entered American politics, but that an old constitutional anxiety—once voiced as a warning—has become an ordinary fact of civic life. Islam, Mamdani, and the ideals of this nation converge in a single, undeniable truth: America is not a Christian nation, nor a nation for whites, nor a nation for the rich alone. It is a nation built on principles shared by all who live in it, and Islam has always been part of that inheritance.
The work, as Mamdani said, has only just begun. But the story his inauguration tells—that Muslims were enslaved at the nation’s birth, debated at its founding, fought in its wars, shaped its abolitionist conscience, transformed its civil rights culture, and now govern its greatest city—is no longer hypothetical.
It stands, unmistakably, on the steps of City Hall.
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Was Muhammad Ali the Very Last Great American Hero?
Of this there is no doubt: he was The Greatest.
Jan 28, 2022
At least once a week, a stranger writing a book, magazine article, newspaper feature, or blog; representing a documentary film, radio serial, or podcast; researching a paper for middle school, high school, or college asks me for an interview about Muhammad Ali. I'm on the short list of live resources because I began covering him when he was Cassius Clay and I was starting out as a New York Times sports reporter.
Other than, I guess, Abraham Lincoln or Jesus Christ, the current go-to-guy for a quick symbolic fix of history, spirituality, and spectacle is that heavyweight boxer who called himself The Greatest. Somehow, he's now right up there with two other once super-polarizing figures -- the greatest American president and the greatest Christian of all time.
I've been wondering lately just how Ali actually reached such heights. There are plenty of people alive today who once hated him and yet, in American popular culture, he's now a secular saint.
"I've always thought that Ali's journey from youthful ignorance to a hard-earned enlightenment was one of the most inspiring stories in the history of sports."
He would only have been 80 years old on January 17th. He died in 2016 at 74. While Lincoln and Christ were dramatically killed in their prime, Ali's life began fading away before our eyes while he was still in his thirties. That was when he gradually began losing his voice (and oh, what a voice it was!), his mobility, and his expressive affect, first from the pummeling that boxing gave him and then from Parkinson's Disease.
I rarely refuse interview requests about him. As one of a diminishing group of old, mostly white male journalists who knew Clay before he was champion, I feel an obligation to help set straight a willfully misinterpreted biography. I'm also always curious about why strangers are so fascinated by Ali and who they think he really was.
In recent years, they've ranged from the documentary king Ken Burns to an eighth-grader from California named Harmony. Like most of the scores of others, their questions were remarkably sharp and well-prepared, although most of them lean toward the Ali industry's common image of him as a fiery social warrior who arrived fully formed at a time in need of just such a hero.
That image is easier than dealing with his early espousal of a separatist cult preaching that white people were devils genetically created by an evil scientist. On Allah's chosen day of retribution, went the dogma of the Nation of Islam cult to which he then belonged, the Mother of Planes would bomb all but the righteous, who were to be spirited away. It was also easier than remembering Ali's repudiation of his early mentor, Malcolm X. Ali chose the Nation's leader, Elijah Muhammad, over him, a betrayal that may have doomed Malcolm to assassination.
Years after leaving the sect and converting to orthodox Islam, Ali offered a far more measured message. While he still gave the Nation of Islam credit for offering him a black-is-beautiful message at a time of low self-esteem and persecution, he also said definitively that "color doesn't make a man a devil. It's the heart and soul and mind that count. What's on the outside is only decoration."
And he admitted that he had made a mistake in turning his back on Malcolm, partly in fear for his own life.
The Operatic Life
I've always thought that Ali's journey from youthful ignorance to a hard-earned enlightenment was one of the most inspiring stories in the history of sports, perhaps even a kind of morality play or, at the least, an opera.
And so, I was hardly surprised last month, on the same day I answered an Austrian journalist's emailed Ali questions, to learn that, thanks to Covid-19, Opera Las Vegas had indeed postponed the opening of a new opera, "Approaching Ali."
Meanwhile, the Ali Center in Louisville was sponsoring a star-studded virtual event celebrating what would have been his 80th birthday. And the Smithsonian Channel announced a new two-hour documentary, Cassius X: Becoming Ali, about the five-year "spiritual and ideological journey" in which, from 1959 to 1964, that callow young boxer was transformed into a world champion. (And, yes, I'm a talking head in it, along with Burns's eight-hour epic and too many others.)
All of this leaves us with the question of how Ali -- or at least a version of Ali -- became the Last American Hero. The American dream may be coming apart at the seams, but the glory of The Greatest is in full flower and still growing. Why?
The simplest answer - and the most discouraging - may be the right one. There is no one else. In the age of Trump, the Hero Pool has dried up, if at least you ignore the endless movie characters based on comic book super people (or creatures). Even my own childhood fave, Superman, who early in his career battled the Nazis, has lost his dominance.
In America, the terrible tribalization of the Trump era has made it almost impossible to consider any kind of consensus hero worship in any genre (Dr. King, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Who?) while culture was becoming as politicized as politics. The usual default for hero worship, sports, has turned into an all-star disaster area and perhaps a leading reason for the idol abyss of the present moment.
A Roster of Hyped (and Then Discredited) Heroes
Lately, almost every sport has contributed a major disappointment in the form of a hyped hero who came up all too short. Recently and typically, the popular golfer Phil Mickelson was one of a group of PGA pros who signed up for a lucrative tournament in Saudi Arabia (with its murderous regime) at about the same time the number-one tennis player, Novak Djokovic, was trying unsuccessfully to stay and play in Australia while unvaxxed.
As we inched toward the February 13th Super Bowl, many began rooting not for but against fan darling Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers who turned out to be another unvaxxed slickster. When the Pittsburgh Steelers were eliminated from the playoffs, their long-time superstar quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was relieved of a full-scale moral review, but he won't be able to avoid it when he becomes a candidate for the Hall of Fame.
Among the sportswriters who vote for the future immortals, baseball has similarly had a long-simmering argument over the moral qualifications for its Hall of Fame candidates. And that, as it happens, offers a controversy all its own. Since induction brings a substantial boost in sideshow income, isn't it a conflict of interest for so-called journalists to reward their subjects that way?
In any case, the argument over qualifications seems to have boiled down to skirmishes between the Moralists, who can't abide the likes of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, or Curt Schilling, all of whom have been accused of using performance enhancing drugs, and the Analytics, who believe that only statistics should be the basis for such final judgments. (Allegations of drug use or bad behavior be damned.)
Such arguments have devalued the very idea of a Hall of Fame because the statistically minded sportswriters come across as mindless boosters hiding behind numbers, while the Moralists seem like all-too-tiresome finger-pointers. How do you get heroes out of that?
The answer is: you don't. So you go back to Ali, who was stripped of his heavyweight title in 1967 after refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam-era Army for religious reasons. It's always worth recalling that he was not penalized by some federal agency or central governing sports body, but rather by scores of politically appointed local boxing commissions.
Hero and Villain
Ali immediately became both hero and villain, celebrated for a principled stand against the Vietnam War ("Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam after so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?... I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong"), vilified for rejecting his country's call of duty, and sentenced to five years in jail for refusing induction, later overturned by the Supreme Court. The passion of those 55-year-old reactions to Ali's draft avoidance were echoed in 2016, several weeks after his death when, in one of sports' most symbolic acts, Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem before a pro football game and instead took a knee.
As that season unfolded and Kaepernick became a right-wing target, it seemed as though the San Francisco 49ers' quarterback would prove a worthy successor to Ali as an all-American hero-in-chief. He, too, was clearly taking a personally dangerous and politically principled stand and his avowed purpose -- to call attention to discrimination against people of color -- seemed unassailable.
But even as Ali remained a secular saint, Kaepernick would be maligned and smoothly sideswiped. He really wasn't such a good quarterback, it was said (although he had led his team to the Super Bowl), and anyway he was nothing but a pawn of the Black Lives Matter movement. Most damaging for Kaepernick, I think, was the lack of white support, especially among other National Football League players. (Black support wasn't so widespread, either.) Ali, of course, never lost the favor of the millions of young white fans against the draft.
Ali's herohood remains unsullied, especially because it's been sanitized. The fearsome social warrior of 1967 came, in the end, to be celebrated as something of a teddy bear.
Ringing the Wrong Bell
The issue of neutering a feared social warrior has been covered most trenchantly by Thomas Hauser, the lawyer and novelist who is Ali's most exhaustive and reliable chronicler. His description of Ali as "a beacon of hope for oppressed people all over the world" as well as "the embodiment of love" whose "dreams inspired the world," has clearly led to his antipathy toward what he sees as the relentless commercialization of Ali. No example of this was more symbolic than his appearance at the New York Stock Exchange on December 31, 1999. Hauser says he thought Ali should have celebrated that millennial moment "at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter to draw attention to the plight of the disadvantaged."
Ali, according to Hauser, was, however, adept at avoiding making rich white people feel guilty or even uncomfortable. The cruelest Ali had ever been publicly was to his most formidable opponent, Joe Frazier, a Black man -- calling him a "gorilla," while mocking his nose, lips, and skin.
"In real life," writes Hauser, "Ali played the race card against Frazier in a particularly mean-spirited way. For the entertainment of white America, he labeled Joe as ugly and dumb. And at the same time, speaking to Black America, he branded Frazier an Uncle Tom, turning him into an object of derision and scorn within the Black community."
One of the harshest observers of Ali's commodification, Mike Marqusee, author of Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties, broadened such a critique by writing:
"Ali's power in the third world grew precisely because he was a symbol of defiance against racism and the use of United States military power abroad. And those issues are very much alive today; so, it means a lot to the powers that be if Ali can be used to suggest to the rest of the world that they aren't problems anymore. [Ali's] history is now being plundered and deliberately obscured to sell commercial products and, more significantly, ideas."
No wonder I looked for hope in Harmony. After the Zoom interview and some follow-up e-mails, I asked the California eighth grader if she and her project colleagues would answer two short questions: Based on your research, what do you think Ali should be remembered for now? Is that the same thing you might have thought before you did your research?
Generously, Harmony offered the views of her classmate, Yaseen, who wrote that he thinks "Ali should be remembered for being arguably the most iconic athlete of all time and as a hero because he taught young Black people that they could do anything and he should also be remembered for the positivity and love he spread in his life." Before researching his life, he had merely thought that Ali "was a good boxer."
That was positive. And then, the day that Yaseen's tribute arrived, part of a weekend that would include my birthday, as well as Ali's and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, a request arrived from a Purdue University graduate student for information about Superman's role in American culture. Many years ago, I had been involved in a TV show that peripherally addressed that subject. Of course, I agreed to answer his questions and started plowing through old notes where I found a reference to a 1978 DC comic book called "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali" in which the two team up to defeat an alien invasion of America.
My heart raced at that. Alien invasion? We're in the middle of one right now. They're called greedy, gutless Republicans and they seem to be winning. And worse yet, they have a hero whose seedy charisma and shamelessness is enough to inflame his nervous and needy followers.
Spoiler alert: in the comic, the good guys win and Ali shouts, "Superman, WE are the greatest!"
And it's true. Unlike Trump, the champ was willing to share the glory. What more can we expect from a "hero" these days?
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America's Greatest Athletes Are Standing Up, Calling This Country To Change
Despite unprecedented, multiracial demonstrations across the country protesting police violence against African Americans, the horrors keep on coming.
Sep 01, 2020
The greatest athletes in America are standing up for justice at a critical time.
Despite unprecedented, multiracial demonstrations across the country protesting police violence against African Americans, the horrors keep on coming.
Last week, Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a policeman in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the anger has grown, some of the protests have been marred by vandalism and looting. Now armed right-wing militia groups are escalating the tensions. In Kenosha, two demonstrators were murdered and one wounded by a 17-year-old Trump supporter illegally wielding an assault weapon.
It is into this cauldron that the professional basketball players of the NBA stood up, forcing a suspension of the playoffs, to support the call for justice. Their example was picked up by others--the WNBA, baseball players, tennis champions like Naomi Osaka and more.
This takes courage. Great athletes are taught to focus on their sport and to ignore their power in the culture. Owners, agents, managers and fans see them as entertainment, not as citizens or leaders.
Yet the very God-given gifts, discipline and skills that make a great athlete contribute to their capacity for leadership. In the Old Testament, little David honed his skill with a sling. When an oppressive horde led by a giant named Goliath threatened the Hebrew people, David stepped up, hurling the stone that slew the giant and saved his people.
Now America's greatest athletes are standing up, calling this country to change. They know that they will face criticism and abuse. They know that they could be risking their careers and livelihood.
When LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and the Miami Heat players stood up in response to the death of Trayvon Martin, Americans across the country took notice. The same is true now as the current athletes focus on Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake and the others they name.
They know the risks, but they also know that when they leave the court or playing field and return to their families, they are just another Black person to the police, and must worry about how to protect their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, or even themselves. Both Sterling Brown of the Milwaukee Bucks and Thabo Sefolosha of the Houston Rockets were victims of police lawlessness.
Here the example and leadership of LeBron James has been critical. Athletes across the world look up to him. When LeBron uses his platform to speak out--even in the face of insults from the president and others--he sets a tone and an example for others. In my opinion, he uses his gifts and platform so responsibly because it is his way of thanking God by serving others.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used his gifts and platform to change the culture. Today, athletes are using their commitment to call this country to its senses.
Great athletes have often been pacesetters. When Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson stood up to racially biased and arbitrary social mores, he impacted the culture. When Joe Lewis defeated Max Schmeling, he pummeled the entire Nazi theory and racist ideology. When Jesse Owens became the world's fastest man at the Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler wouldn't shake his hand, but when Owens came home, he told me President Roosevelt wouldn't shake his hand either. Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier in baseball and bore the physical and psychological scars from doing it.
At the height of his career, Muhammad Ali, became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and paid the price of years stolen from his career. Every athlete should be grateful to Curt Flood for ending the reserve clause and gaining athletes the right to free agency to negotiate the best deal they could. Colin Kaepernick launched his nonviolent campaign against police killing of Black people four years ago that has cost him his career.
The athletes had to stop business as usual to gain attention. They have been in intense meetings figuring out how they can most be effective. They understand that the murders can't go on; the system must change. They are calling on others to join them. They are putting their time and their resources on the line. They've now convinced NBA owners to turn their arenas into polling places where people might vote safely.
Their actions have already had effect. It is too easy for cynical politicians and entrenched interests to turn attention from the injustice to the excesses that mar those protesting it. The players have forced our attention back to the injustice and to the core demand that Black Lives Matter. For that, they deserve our respect and our support.
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