America does not have a healthy relationship with Islam – the religion is popularly regarded with suspicion and mistrust. It’s seen as something exotic, fundamentalist and far, far away. And yet in the middle of America’s sporting pantheon floated… a Muslim. Muhammad Ali was a role model for a faith that flourishes in the USA yet is strangely invisible.

He converted to the Nation of Islam in the 1960s but gravitated to mainstream Sunni Islam in 1975. His faith was shaped by his experience of racial prejudice; Islam offered an alternative source of spiritual authority to an American Christianity that could be suffused with white bigotry. Taking a new name severed the bonds to his slave past. But whereas we tend to see Western conversion to Islam as wholly politically motivated, as an intellectual reaction to events, what’s striking about Ali’s faith is how personal, quiet and deeply felt it obviously was.

Consider his reaction to 9-11. I take the following from an interview in Reader's Digest with Howard Bingham, a photographer and confidant: