Ali Abazeed is Chief Public Health Officer and Director of the Detroit Health Department for the City of Detroit. He wrote this essay in a personal capacity to share with Michigan Public. You can listen to his reading of the essay above.
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In February 1967, Muhammad Ali spent fifteen rounds asking his opponent, Ernie Terrell, a question. Terrell had insisted on calling him “Cassius Clay,” a name Ali had set down three years earlier. And so between jabs Ali asked it again and again:
“What’s my name?”
Ali was the most famous man alive. And still, another man believed he had the authority to decide what he was called. Ali had told Terrell before the fight how it would end.
“My name is Muhammad Ali,” he said, “and you will announce it right there in the center of that ring.”
When Muhammad Ali died in 2016, I was a fellow at the Detroit Health Department, working for its director, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. We had both admired Ali, and his death sat heavily on the two of us all week.
“Ali’s funeral’s tomorrow. Wanna go?” Abdul asked me after a meeting, as if the plan were already made and only the driving was left.
We finished the workday, got in his car, and drove to Louisville, taking turns at the wheel while he took calls from the road. Between calls, he played audiobooks at twice their normal speed, and I pretended to keep up. It was Ramadan, and the shawarmas I ordered for us became the iftar we ate on the highway.
The service was the Jenazah, the Muslim funeral prayer, held at Freedom Hall, the arena where Ali had fought his first professional bout. Ali had planned it that way years in advance and wanted it open to anyone who came. No stage, no altar. They carried the casket in and set it on the floor facing Mecca while 14,000 people stood behind it. Abdul and I were at the ropes as the body passed, and what rose from the hall were the chants of his name.
Ali. Ali. Ali.
Not the name on his birth certificate, but the one he had chosen and spent a lifetime insisting on. Then we took our places in the rows and prayed over him.
I think about that day more than almost any other from those years working with Abdul, and I finally understand why. We had driven down to watch a nation say a Muslim’s name the way he had told them to say it. Beside me, praying, stood a man who would spend the next decade demanding the same thing. It was not the first time I had prayed beside him. At the office, he would often say, “It’s prayer time. Wanna pray?” and pause the workday for it, the way you stop for anything owed, and then go back to work.
In 2017, a commentator on this station, then Michigan Radio, asked listeners to imagine a candidate named “Andy Smith,” while sharing Abdul’s biography and Abdul’s accomplishments. Then the writer revealed whom he meant. The commentary was called “Great candidate, not so great name.” He admired Abdul, and he wrote with sympathy, which is exactly what stays with me. To help his audience see Abdul’s future, he first had to let them imagine a man who did not have to carry Abdul’s name.
The life arrived as a promise, but the name landed as a problem.
A year later, when Abdul ran for governor, my friend and I wrote about “The Myth of Viability”: Democrats quietly telling Abdul his name and faith made him unelectable. We answered with his résumé: Rhodes Scholar, physician, the man who rebuilt Detroit’s health department after the bankruptcy. Reading that piece now, I recognize the hope in it, that enough accomplishment might finally settle the matter. Those credentials spoke to what kind of governor he would be, but no credential should have been asked to explain why a Muslim could be one.
This year the names came from much higher up. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said Abdul slept in “a bin Laden jersey,” and Mike Rogers chuckled beside him. The president called him “Muhammad” over and over, and when someone asked why, he said he felt like it.
“I’m the president,” he told a rally. “I can call you whatever the hell I want.”
That is the whole argument, stated plainly. The question was never whether a name is long or hard to say. It was about who has the authority to say what you are called: you, or someone with the power to make a room laugh. Terrell believed he had that power. The president believes he has it.
Abdul and I never talked about the use and misuse of his name during the campaign. We didn’t have to. I know him well enough to recognize a man persevering, and I knew what it was costing him. I kept thinking of the children who heard the president make a joke of a name like theirs, and of the people who say those children’s names with love.
Abdul’s race for U.S. Senate was called at 2:27 in the morning. I was home; I had an early meeting waiting at the Detroit Health Department, which I now run, in the same role Abdul once held. History doesn't excuse you from the morning meeting, but I stayed up late and watched my friend take the stage in victory. A few minutes in, he returned a year’s worth of favors and called the president by his first name.
“Donald, look, I know you struggled with my name.”
Of all the names available to the president, the one he had reached for to taunt Abdul was Muhammad.
Ten years ago, after Muhammad Ali’s funeral, we drove straight to my mother’s house in Dearborn. The sun was setting, and that is where I broke my fast. Abdul met my family that night. I don’t remember exactly what Mama served; it would have been the Syrian food I grew up on, lamb simmered in yogurt and ladled over rice, a salad of torn bread and tomatoes, more of everything than anyone could finish. I remember what she called him.
Abdul. Abdulrahman. Habibi.
My mother had no use for Andy Smith. In her kitchen, a name was not a problem to be solved. It was what you called a man when you wanted him to come to the table.
A name is the only thing a person owns entirely. It was Abdul’s before the scholarship and the medical degree, before the department and the campaign, and it will be his when all of those are lines in someone else’s history. Everything else on a résumé is conferred by people who could have withheld it, but a name is not conferred. It is announced.
And that is what a name authorizes: to be called by it. By your mother, by the imam over your body, and by the clerk of the United States Senate when the roll is called in January. Ali knew that in 1967. Louisville heard it in 2016. Michigan felt it on November 3.
In the small hours of November 4, in Detroit, Abdul opened the way Muhammad Ali had promised Terrell it would end, in the center of the ring.
“My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.”
Senator-Elect from the State of Michigan.
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Editor's note: The 2017 opinion piece - “Great Candidate, Not So Great Name” - published by Michigan Public was referenced by Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for U.S. Senate in 2026 as an example of the latent Islamophobia he would have to overcome to win office. El-Sayed won his bid for the Senate on 11/3/2026, having faced a counter campaign of both blatant and latent Islamophobia. Michigan Public regrets publishing an opinion that contributed to the proliferation of those xenophobic ideas. Michigan Public does not stand by the idea that a person's name should inhibit their ability to run for public office.
