The US Pays Its Final Respects to Muhammad Ali

After three days of ceremonies, America bade farewell to one of its greatest heroes. A champion boxer who incarnated the ideals of today’s multicultural and multifaith country.

America has paid its last respects to Muhammad Ali, one of its greatest heroes. A 30-kilometer (approximately 19 miles) long funeral procession was watched by thousands of people chanting “Ali! Ali!” as it passed through his home town of Louisville. The ceremony, which included eulogies from former President Bill Clinton and Malcolm X’s daughter, Attallah Shabazz, highlighted how Ali became a global icon.

He was buried in a private ceremony at Cave Hill cemetery. Since his death last Friday at the age of 74, following a fight against Parkinson’s disease, the country has only had eyes for this man born in Kentucky during the era of the Jim Crow racial segregation laws.

The Face of Multicultural America

In the boxing ring, the future 1960 Olympic champion danced to the rhythm of his determination, floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. Today, he represents the almost ideal face of multicultural, multifaith and tolerant America. His passing, which moved the whole country, nonetheless serves as a reminder. Since the deaths of several young black men killed due to police error, the United States has discovered with horror that institutional racism persists and continues to undermine relations between the police and African-Americans.

The Republican candidate for the White House, Donald Trump, makes incendiary and racist statements toward Muslims — who he wants to ban from entering the United States — and toward a U.S. federal judge — who he judges to be incapable of carrying out his duties because he is “Mexican” (his parents were Mexican immigrants) — in contrast to the universal values that Ali spread throughout the world, those of a tolerant, peaceful Islam, clearly compatible with democracy.

‘Islam Is Peace’

For American Muslims, who in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 have been subjected to a backlash from the attacks perpetrated by radical Islamists, Ali inadvertently became one of the best American ambassadors in the fight against rampant Islamophobia. He immediately sent out a clear message: “Islam is not a religion that kills. Islam is peace.”

‘Thanks to Muhammad Ali, It Has Become Cool To Be Muslim.’

He gave Islam a new image on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1964, when he abandoned his “slave name” Cassius Clay, to become Muhammad Ali and joined the Nation of Islam, a group of African-Americans who fought for equal rights in a more radical fashion than the civil rights movement, white America had trouble accepting it. In time, the “Champ” would swap his somewhat radical views for a more inclusive discourse. The American press would nonetheless humiliate him for years by continuing to call him Cassius Clay. In 2016, many young American Muslims still claimed to identify with the Champ: “Thanks to Muhammad Ali, it has become cool to be Muslim.”

‘I Am America’

If Muhammad Ali is so venerated on the other side of the Atlantic, it is also because he incarnates America’s self-confidence. In a room adjoining the Oval Office, President Barack Obama has carefully preserved the star’s boxing gloves beneath a poster of the boxer roaring after flooring his opponent Sonny Liston. It is difficult not to see in the “Black Lives Matter” movement, a contemporary version of the African-American affirmation that Ali made his trademark. In the 1960s, he said: “I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me – black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours.”

In a country where Blacks were second-class citizens, it was an extraordinarily bold claim. It recalls those of other black sportspeople like Jesse Owens — who defied Aryan rhetoric during the 1936 Berlin Olympics — or Jackie Robinson — who broke down the racial barriers in one of America’s most beloved national sports, baseball. In the same vein, the young boxing champion built himself a training camp at the heart of Deer Lake, a small village in Pennsylvania where the vast majority of inhabitants were white. He lived there from 1972 until 1980. Although they were not all his friends, he managed to charm people there by getting involved with community life. He did not hesitate to do magic tricks with the local kids, who were entranced, and show them boxing matches on 16mm movie film.

Muhammad Ali leaves a message that resounds strongly in an America weary of years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. His radical opposition to the Vietnam War, to the detriment of his career, appeals to those who, like presidential candidate Bernie Sanders or the libertarian Sen. Rand Paul, call for the disengagement of American troops from the theaters of conflict around the world. To sum him up in one sentence, the Champ is a distillation of American ideals of both yesterday and today. As Obama highlighted, “He was a fighter in the ring who fought for what was right. A man who fought for us.”