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My dad was a boxing fan, he loved boxing, and there was no Boxer bigger badder and a nimble showman than the legendary Muhammad Ali. He told me about the thriller in Manilla and all the great boxing matches, in a time before YouTube, I just had to wait and catch a clip on TV someday.
But you cant tell the story of Muhammad Ali without telling the story of Cassius Clay, a young talented and confident black man growing up in the turmoil abusive and racist American society whom he came to be beloved by. This always wasnt the case, Muhammad Ali before he was legendary was the black sheep whom had refused to fight for the 'country which had provided him so much', as one news columnist put it.
You cant tell the story of Muhammad Ali without telling the story of Malcolm X, a wild rockious young black man who hadnt found his calling until he found a prison cell and Islam, so these stories began and went to Huey and the Panthers and a movement that had captured my father.
For almost all of the 20th Century, Iran and many of its neighboring countries were the subject of European colonizers, British, French, American, then the threat of the Russians as the oil fields became prominent, so a wave of a Century of Colonialism continued, with fake puppet kings and governments. This is the Iran my father had grown up in, a land full of tradition, with a wealth of knowledge and history dating to the begins of human civilizations, doomed by the discovery and need for oil.
The message of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and the many brave Africans which I was raised to admire wasnt because of their skilled athletic prowness but our connection to their struggle and the common enemy which guided our lives from far east asia to the middle east and the vast lands of Africa. We were a people under fire and that fire was coming from the same place, using the same fuel of greed and hypocrisy to infest its seed into our psyche to be carried out like robots for generations to come, and this more than anything is what w
e need to brake from, the psyche of the colonized.