Some US Sufi Adherents Claim Spiritual Kinship with Muhammad Ali

As the world mourns the death of Muhammad Ali, some American adherents of the Islamic Sufi tradition have taken to social media to claim spiritual kinship with the boxing great, but scholars say the assertion may be more rooted in hype than in fact. “There is no question that Ali himself had an interest in and inclination towards the mystical practice of Islam,” said Omid Safi, director of the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University, who met Ali in 2004 and spent a day with him at the...

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