Page 3 The Islamic Bulletin Volume XXIV No. 28 World Heavyweight Champion requirements to receive Allah’s Jannah. Q: Muhammad, I’d like to know what you are going to do when you retire from boxing. When I retire from boxing, I really don’t know. I wanna say something right here, this might make you all think. Life is real short, so you add up all your traveling, all your sleeping, your school, your entertainment, you probably been half your life doing nothing. I am now 35 years old; 30 more years I’ll be 65. We don’t have no more influence, we can’t do nothing much at 65, your wife will tell you that. When you’re 65, ain’t too much more to do. Did you know I will be 65 in 30 years? In those 30 years, I have to sleep 9 years, I don’t have 30 years of daylight, I have to travel back to America which takes 6-7 hours. With all my traveling, that will be probably 4 years of traveling in the next 30 years. About 9 years of sleeping, television, movies, and about 3 years of entertainment. So, out of 30 years I might have about 16 years to be productive; so this is how we can all break down our individual lives. What I am going to do in the next 16 years, what is the best thing I can do? Get ready to meet God. Going into real estate, going into business, teaching boxers, that won’t get me to heaven. Now, let me ask this audience a question. How many believe there is a supreme being? How many believe there’s a God? How many believe there’s some power that made the sun, the moon, the stars? How many believe that this stuff didn’t just come out here? Somebody wiser than us made it. How many believe there’s a God? How many believe there’s not a God? Alright, if I told you, you who don’t believe in God, if I told you that this glass sprung into existence, would you believe it? That this glass made itself, no man made this glass, would you believe it? Would you believe if I just told you this thing made itself? No, no. You wouldn’t believe it, right? If I told you this television station popped into existence, no man made it, you would say that Muhammad Ali is crazy. Alright, well, this glass can’t make itself. If I told you that the clothes you have on wove themselves, that nobody created them, those clothes made themselves, you wouldn’t believe it. But if your clothes didn’t make itself, if that glass couldn’t make itself, if this building didn’t make itself, then how did the moon get out there? How did the stars and Jupiter, Neptune and Mars, and the Sun get out there? How did all this come here if a wise planner didn’t make it? So what I’m saying is I believe we’re going to be judged. Should a man like Hitler kill the Jews and get away with it? Somebody should punish him. Maybe he don’t get it now, he get it when he die. In hell for eternity. So what I’m gonna do when I get out of boxing, is to get myself reading to meet God because ……………….it’s a scary thing to think that I’m going to hell to burn eternally forever. So what am I gonna do? The reason why I’m taking such a long time to answer your question is that I’m explaining what you asked in the question. You asked me a question; I can’t just answer it like that. When I get out of boxing or when I’m through, I’m gonna do all I can to help people. Here’s a poor man come all the way to America. There’s a bunch of boys need some money and somebody is calling me to help them. God is watching me. God don’t praise me because I beat Joe Frazier. God don’t give nothing about Joe Frazier. God don’t care nothing about England or America as far as we aware of. He wants to know how do we Muhammad Ali is perhaps the most well-known American convert to Islam. A three-time World Heavyweight Champion, who embraced Islam in 1965, Ali is one of the first public figures in America to be identified with Islam. In fact, no other athlete has been given more media attention than he. Ali has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated more than thirty times, and his name and face are known to people all over the world. Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay in 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky, of a Baptist mother and Methodist father. He started boxing at a young age so as to be able to buy his parents a car; by the time he was in his twenties, many considered him the greatest fighter of all time. After winning the Rome Olympics in 1960, he became the darling of the American public--handsome, charming, and greatly successful. In 1963 he recorded an album in which he extolled his own merits (“I am the greatest”) in a stunt that brought him even greater publicity. I, like so many other Americans, follow our sports figures’ lives and sporting careers. But no other sports figure has been as captivating as Muhammad Ali. Perhaps because he is also a Muslim, or perhaps because he stood up for his religious and political beliefs by refusing to be drafted in the Vietnam War, and consequently gave up his boxing career to do what he felt was right. Instead of being enticed by money or his personal agents surrounding him, Muhammad Ali stood up for himself and for Islam. During this time of the turbulent 1960’s, this must have not been an easy thing to do. And for that, I have deep admiration for an iconic figure that history will never be able to reproduce. I chose this interview from the year 1977. Muhammad Ali was visiting Newcastle, England and it was a typical question and answer type of forum where his British fans could ask him questions. What I found so profound while listening to this interview was how Ali could take a seemingly simple question and answer it in a way to preach about the Oneness of God. In this particular interview a young boy asks Ali the following question and his captivating response is mesmerizing. Ali would take every opportunity to give Dawah and use his fame and stature to make the public contemplate about man’s existence, life after death, and the necessary
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