CAIRO—Of all Muhammad Ali’s travels in the Muslim world, his 1964 trip to Egypt was perhaps the most symbolic, a visit remembered mostly by an iconic photo of the boxing great happily shaking hands with a smiling Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egypt’s nationalist and popular president.
It was a mutually beneficial meeting: Nasser was viewed with suspicion and mistrust by the United States, but was revered across much of Africa and Asia for his support of movements fighting European colonial powers. For Ali, the new heavyweight boxing champion, being received by one of “imperialist” America’s chief enemies announced his arrival on the global stage as a powerful voice of change.
The boxing genius and revolutionary political views of Ali, who died Friday at age 74, emerged when America’s civil rights movement was in full swing and the Vietnam war raged on, sharply dividing Americans. In those years, the Muslim world was experiencing a post-colonial era defined by upheaval, with most developing nations taking sides in the Cold War, allying themselves to varying degrees with the United States or the Soviet Union.
