Iqbal Akhtar is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Politics & International Relations in the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University, where he is founding director of the Western Indian Ocean Studies and Jain Studies programs. He is the author of The Khoja of Tanzania (Brill, 2015) and writes on covenantal pluralism, Muslim–Jewish relations, and Islam in the Americas. He preaches at the Slidell Masjid of Al-Islam and publishes at interfaiths.substack.com.
On June 28, 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States did something it had spent nearly a year trying to avoid: it sided with a Muslim. In Clay v. United States, the justices unanimously reversed the draft-evasion conviction of the heavyweight champion the world knew as Muhammad Ali, who four years earlier had refused induction into the armed forces on the ground that his faith forbade him to fight in a war he had not been called to by God. The conviction had cost him his title, his passport, and the prime of his athletic career. The Court gave it all back—but it did so on the narrowest possible footing, holding only that the government had given the appeal board flawed legal advice and that it was impossible to know which of three offered grounds the board had relied upon.
The holding was technical; the human story behind it was not. As Marty Lederman has reconstructed from the private papers of the justices, the Court was initially poised to affirm Ali’s conviction by a vote of five to three. Justice John Marshall Harlan reversed himself only after his clerks pressed him to actually read what the Nation of Islam taught, including the writings of Elijah Muhammad, and concluded that Ali’s objection to war was genuinely religious and sincerely held. The deadlock that followed was broken when Justice Potter Stewart found a face-saving procedural exit that allowed every justice to reverse without ruling squarely on the deeper question—whether a Black Muslim boxer’s conscience deserved the same constitutional dignity that the law had long extended to a Quaker’s.
“The Ali case is not merely a footnote in sports history or First Amendment doctrine. It is a parable of American Islam’s long negotiation for a place inside the nation’s constitutional covenant.”
That hesitation is the most instructive thing about the case. Concurring, Justice William O. Douglas observed that the correct reading of the statute placed Ali in a class honored by the First Amendment. The Court could not quite say it out loud, but the logic of its own jurisprudence demanded that Muslim conscience be recognized as American conscience. Half a century later, as the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding in 2026, that half-spoken recognition is worth examining closely. The Ali case is not merely a footnote in sports history or First Amendment doctrine. It is a parable of American Islam’s long negotiation for a place inside the nation’s constitutional covenant—and a useful vantage from which to ask what the next century should hold.
Justice William O. Douglas observed that the correct reading of the statute placed Ali in a class honored by the First Amendment. The Court could not quite say it out loud, but the logic of its own jurisprudence demanded that Muslim conscience be recognized as American conscience.
A Community That Was Always Here
Muslims were not late arrivals to the American story. As Kambiz GhaneaBassiri has documented, a significant portion of the Africans enslaved and brought to these shores were Muslim, and Islam has been woven into the fabric of American life since before the republic itself was declared. Ali’s case sits at a decisive hinge in that history: the moment an indigenous, predominantly African American Muslim movement compelled the nation’s highest court to take Muslim conviction seriously on its own terms. As Sherman Jackson and Edward Curtis have each shown, the mid-century Black Muslim resurgence was not a deviation from American religious history but one of its most consequential native expressions—a community theologizing its own dignity in the face of a country that withheld it.
Today American Muslims are among the most racially and ethnically diverse faith communities in the country, drawing together African American, South Asian, Arab, West African, Persian, Southeast Asian, and convert traditions under a shared confession. The arc of this history is therefore not one of arrival, as though Muslims were perpetual newcomers awaiting admission, but one of indigenization—of a community that has always been here gradually learning to articulate its flourishing in fully American terms. The semiquincentennial is an occasion to ask what that flourishing actually requires.
Beyond Tolerance: Defining Muslim Flourishing
What would it mean for American Muslims to flourish—not merely to be surveilled less, tolerated more, or quietly assimilated into invisibility? Tolerance is a famously low bar. It asks only that we endure one another’s existence. Flourishing asks something far more demanding: that each community be free to be fully and authentically itself while actively safeguarding the freedom of others to do the same.
“Tolerance is a famously low bar. It asks only that we endure one another’s existence. Flourishing asks something far more demanding: that each community be free to be fully itself while actively safeguarding the freedom of others to do the same.”
The framework of covenantal pluralism, developed by W. Christopher Stewart, Chris Seiple, and Dennis Hoover, names this aspiration well. It moves the conversation beyond mere coexistence toward what they call a covenant of peaceable neighborhood—a society in which deep religious difference is met not with grudging forbearance but with reciprocal, covenanted commitment. For Muslims, this is no foreign import requiring translation. The Qur’an grounds human difference in divine intent itself: God made the peoples and tribes distinct precisely so that they might come to know one another—li-taʿārafū (Q 49:13). And the political precedent is older than the American republic by more than a millennium: the Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīna, the so-called Constitution of Medina, in which the Prophet Muhammad bound Muslims, Jews, and others into a single covenanted polity—an umma wāḥida—with mutual obligations of defense and protected conscience. American Muslim flourishing, on this reading, is simply the exercise of the mīthāq—the covenant—in a new land.
Interfaith Dialogue as Covenantal Obligation
This reframing carries a sharp practical edge. If flourishing is covenantal, then interfaith dialogue is not a pleasant extracurricular activity for the unusually pious, nor a defensive public-relations exercise undertaken after each new wave of suspicion. It is a covenantal responsibility intrinsic to the faith. When a synagogue, a church, a gurdwara, or a mosque is attacked, the covenant is breached—and the Muslim obligation in that moment is not sympathy offered from a comfortable distance but solidarity rendered up close, at cost, and in person.
This standard cuts inward as much as outward. The violence that has lately been directed at Jewish communities across this country, and the antisemitism that sometimes finds shelter even within Muslim discourse, is by this measure not only a moral failure but a betrayal of the mīthāq itself. A community that asks the republic to honor its conscience cannot dishonor the conscience of its neighbor. The covenant is indivisible; one cannot claim its protections while withholding its duties.
“A community that asks the republic to honor its conscience cannot dishonor the conscience of its neighbor. The covenant is indivisible; one cannot claim its protections while withholding its duties.”
There is precedent for a religious community formally articulating such responsibility toward others. In 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church promulgated Nostra Aetate, repudiating the charge of collective Jewish guilt and affirming the Church’s spiritual bond with Jews, Muslims, and other communities of faith. The declaration did not dissolve doctrinal difference; it dignified it. American Muslims approaching 250 might fairly ask what our own Nostra Aetate would look like—a deliberate, public articulation of covenantal obligation toward the other faith communities with whom we share this country, rooted not in the language of expedience but in the Medinan mīthāq and the Qur’anic summons to mutual knowing.
The Class He Was Honored Into
Ali himself completed the arc the Court could not. The man whose conscience the justices could barely bring themselves to recognize in 1971 became, by the end of his life, a global emblem of moral courage—mourned in 2016 across every faith and nation, his funeral a deliberately interreligious affair. He was, in the end, exactly what Justice Douglas said he was: a member of a class honored by the First Amendment. The honor was always there in the founding promise; the nation simply took time to extend it, and Ali took the blows of that delay.’
As the United States turns 250, American Muslims inherit both the promise and the unfinished work. The first task of the community’s first century here was to claim a place within the American covenant—to insist, as Ali did at ruinous personal cost, that Muslim conscience belongs. The task of the next century is subtler and more generous: not merely to hold that place, but to keep it open for others. A community that has known what it is to be doubted, watched, and excluded is uniquely positioned to guarantee that no neighbor suffers the same. That is what covenantal flourishing asks. It is, finally, the most American thing a Muslim community could do—and the most faithful.
Iqbal Akhtar is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Politics & International Relations in the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University, where he is founding director of the Western Indian Ocean Studies and Jain Studies programs. He is the author of The Khoja of Tanzania (Brill, 2015) and writes on covenantal pluralism, Muslim–Jewish relations, and Islam in the Americas. He preaches at the Slidell Masjid of Al-Islam and publishes at interfaiths.substack.com.
References
Clay v. United States, 403 U.S. 698 (1971). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/403/698/
Curtis, E. E., IV. (2006). Black Muslim religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975. University of North Carolina Press.
GhaneaBassiri, K. (2010). A history of Islam in America: From the New World to the new world order. Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, S. A. (2005). Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking toward the third resurrection. Oxford University Press.
Lederman, M. (2016, June 8). Muhammad Ali, conscientious objection, and the Supreme Court’s struggle to understand “jihad” and “holy war”: The story of Cassius Clay v. United States. SCOTUSblog. https://www.scotusblog.com/2016/06/
Second Vatican Council. (1965). Nostra aetate: Declaration on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions. The Holy See. https://www.vatican.va
Serjeant, R. B. (1978). The Sunnah Jāmiʿah, pacts with the Yathrib Jews, and the Taḥrīm of Yathrib: Analysis and translation of the documents comprised in the so-called “Constitution of Medina.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 41(1), 1–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/615623
Stewart, W. C., Seiple, C., & Hoover, D. R. (2020). Toward a global covenant of peaceable neighborhood: Introducing the philosophy of covenantal pluralism. The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 18(4), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2020.1835029