June 5, 1964 - A wildly enthusiastic crowd of 2,000 Egyptian students mobbed the heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, today outside a Moslem mosque in Cairo, where he had prayed barefoot.
The police used leather belts and bamboo sticks to disperse the mob. It took the police 20 minutes to free the fighter.
Ali, on a tour of Africa, went to the Al-Hussein Mosque to pray for the first time in a mosque in a Moslem nation.
“The light of Islam shines all over me,” he said. “Islam has made me feel equal to all brothers on this, our earth. It has made me feel free.”
Clay was somber as he prayed with 1,500 other worshippers inside the mosque.
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