Muhammad Speaks

Ten days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the world's second most famous Muslim stood in the rubble and defended his faith.

"Islam is not a killer religion," Muhammad Ali told rescue workers. "Islam means peace."

Before Sept. 11, the former heavyweight champion was undoubtedly the best-known adherent of the fastest growing (and, in the West, the least understood) of the world's religions. Since then, the "prettiest" face in boxing has been supplanted by that of Osama bin Laden as the most recognizable of Islam's roughly one billion believers.

The threat to the popular perception of Islam suggested by this shift is hard to miss. While "bin Laden" has become shorthand for a world's worth of anti-American sentiments, Ali in many ways is America. He's at once the America we'd like to be--the brash young fighter grown into a good-humored humanitarian--and the America we persist in believing we are: a torch-bearer for the nations, as Ali literally was at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Through four decades of veneration we have seen in Ali's celebrity the vaunted American ideal of tolerance writ large. Once he had proven himself on America's terms, the fact of his faith became beside the point. His cultural influence has shown us the mathematics of the melting pot: If America is Ali and Ali is Islam, then America could be Islam too. Or at least claim to be.

With bin Laden, though, the variables have changed. Since the World Trade Center tragedy, Americans for the most part have gone out of their way to prove that we are a people tolerant of religious difference. Yet the now-commonly heard confession of participation in "racial profiling" of Arab-Americans suggests that a deeply rooted distrust of religious difference generally and of Islam in particular has come to the surface. The few violent exceptions to the nationwide display of interfaith solidarity--the murder of a Sikh mistaken for a Muslim in Arizona, the shots fired at a mosque in Texas--only serve to underline this fact. To many, bin Laden, not Ali, "is" Islam now.

But to blame our misunderstanding of Islam on Osama bin Laden alone is merely a convenience, and a self-exonerating one at that. He gives us a good excuse. He lets us forget that the current perception of Islam as not just alien but specifically anti-American has been with us for some time. It can be traced back decades before last month's attacks, and its origins are not what might be expected. As much as such things can be identified with a single event, the perception of Islam as a force opposed to all that Americans value was born one day in 1964, with the simple act of a young man publicly professing his beliefs. His name was Cassius Clay--the man who would be Muhammad Ali.

"I am not a Black Muslim--that is a name made up by the white press," the 22 year-old Clay said. "It's not a legitimate name. The real name is 'Islam.'"

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