Muhammad Ali to be honoured with Muslim prayer service

Fans of the late Muhammad Ali sign a large banner at the I AM ALI event to celebrate his life at the Kentucky Center of the Performing Arts in Louisville, Kentucky

Muslims have travelled from all over the world to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a Kentucky arena for a final tribute to Muhammad Ali.
A fellow Muslim who shares the boxing great's name travelled from Bangladesh. Mohammad Ali arrived with no hotel reservation, just a belief that this pilgrimage was important to honour the global icon in a traditional Islamic service.
The Ali from Bangladesh said he met the boxer in the early 1970s and they struck up a friendship based on their shared name. The Champ visited his home in 1978 and always joked he was his twin brother, he said.
He will join more than 14,000 people who have tickets to the service Thursday in Louisville, which will be broadcast worldwide and streamed online, offering a window into a religion many outsiders know little about.
Organisers say the service, or Jenazah prayer, is open to all but meant especially as a chance for Muslims to say goodbye to a man considered a hero of the faith. US Muslims hope the service for the Kentucky native will help underscore that Islam, so much under attack in recent months, is fully part of American life.
"Muhammad planned all of this," said Imam Zaid Shakir, a prominent US Muslim scholar who will lead Thursday's prayers. "And he planned for it to be a teaching moment."
Ali, who died Friday at 74, famously joined the Nation of Islam, the black separatist religious movement, as a young athlete, then embraced Islam years later, becoming a global representative of the faith and an inspiration to other Muslims.
"One reason Muhammad Ali touched so many hearts, he was willing to sacrifice the fame, the lights, the money, the glamour, all of that, for his beliefs and his principles," Shakir said. "That's moving and that touches people."
Timothy Gianotti, an Islamic scholar at the University of Waterloo, Canada, who has worked for years with the Ali family to plan the remembrances said the service will consist of short, standing prayers said over the body.
The Jenazah service lasts only a few minutes, with people customarily standing in lines, as they recite the prayers. 
In addition to the traditional funeral prayers Thursday, an interfaith memorial service is planned for Friday.
Tickets are still available for the Thursday service at the Kentucky Exposition Center. But all 15,500 tickets for Friday's memorial at the KFC Yum! Center in downtown Louisville were claimed within an hour.
Ali's body will leave the funeral home at 11am Thursday for the short drive to the Exposition Center, led only by a police escort. A miles-long procession is planned for Friday before the memorial. It will pass many points in the city where Ali left his imprint, including a museum in his honor downtown, a boulevard named after him and his childhood home.