Boxing hero Muhammad Ali watches replay of his March 1966 title fight against Henry Cooper. (Wiki Commons)
President Donald Trump’s controversial America’s 250th anniversary includes a set of mobile museums carrying displays about the nation’s history and prominent figures. But one of the displays is angering the religious community because it falsely claims that Muhammad Ali disavowed Islam.
“It is a stunning slight to the man — a beloved global icon, ambassador of peace, athletic legend, and cultural titan — and to Islam, a faith under siege by the Trump administration and others and for which Ali was a powerful envoy to mainstream America,” said former MS NOW analyst and producer Jonathan Larsen, describing the Freedom 250 organization’s so-called “Freedom Trucks.”
“After converting to Islam, he changed his name to Muhammad Ali though he later disavowed the religion,” the Freedom 250 truck Muhammad Ali display claims. But Ali never disavowed, renounced, or converted from Islam, said Larsen. “He died a Muslim and reportedly had a Muslim funeral.
Regardless, six of Trump’s trucks are currently traveling the country as part of the 250th anniversary commemorations.
Larsen reports the nation’s leading Muslim advocacy organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is horrified at the untruth, responded to the falsehood, saying, “We call on the Freedom 250 Mobile Museum to correct the record.”
The displays were produced with the help of two right-wing Christian organizations — Hillsdale College and the media company PragerU — so Larsen said it is no surprise the Freedom Truck exhibits “predictably skew toward Christianity, elevating its role and focusing more on Christian figures, some of them with little relevance to the arc of America’s story and obscure even to history buffs.”
But Ali is one of the most famous Muslims in the world, as well as possibly the most famous American Muslim in history, said Laesen.
“His conversion to Islam was a seminal moment of the 1960s, setting up the legal battle over his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War that robbed him of more than three years of boxing at his peak,” Larsen added. “A fearless advocate for racial equality and justice, Ali spent much of his life after leaving the ring as an ambassador for peace, especially in the Muslim world.
Prager U is known for hacking together inaccurate history videos that enrage historians. Despite its name, PragerU is not a university. It is a conservative nonprofit that produces short videos on historical, economic and climate topics. The organization is founded and run by conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager and funded by a number of like-minded philanthropists.
One of the videos in its history series, in which two modern-day animated kids travel back in time to talk to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, has come under some of the harshest criticism from historians and academics.
The video suggests that Douglass, a former slave, believed founders’ decision not to abolish slavery in the U.S. Constitution was worth it because it helped convince the Southern colonies to join the Union: “Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it,” says cartoon Douglass.