Arab News | When Muhammad Ali visited a small Al-Balad cafe
JEDDAH: More than five decades after the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali, visited Al-Balad in Jeddah, the memory lives on through a small family business.
It was 1972 and Mohammed Ba Zaraah was sitting in his cafe, The Bird Shop, when in walked the legendary American fighter and sampled the traditional Hijazi drink, sobia.
It was during Ali’s first visit to the Kingdom to perform Hajj.
Ba Zaraah’s son, Khalid Najee, told Arab News that he was only 12 in 1972 and not in the cafe when the great man came to visit.
“But the story was passed down to me by my father and the shop has remained with the family for more than five decades,” he said.
“My father told me that Muhammad Ali suddenly entered his small shop. He described him as a big man with a nice smile.”
Ali was accompanied by high-ranking Saudi officials and neighbors soon realized that a famous visitor had entered the shop.
Ba Zaraah responded to the unexpected encounter with a gesture of traditional hospitality.
“He immediately offered him sobia,” Najee said. Sobia is a cold drink often made using barley, brown bread or oats soaked in water, with sugar and spices such as cinnamon and cardamom.
For Ba Zaraah, serving Ali a traditional beverage was an instinctive act of hospitality. But after the boxing legend left the visit took on a life of its own in the neighborhood.
“The neighbors started calling my father ‘Clay’ after Muhammad Ali,” Najee said. Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., before adopting the name Muhammad Ali after converting to Islam.
His 1972 pilgrimage to Makkah is well documented, including photographs taken during Hajj.
Asked if he has a photo of the historical visit, Najee said: “Unfortunately, there is no photograph of Ali with my father.”
“There was no camera in the tiny shop that day and the encounter was never expected to become a piece of family history. Instead it survived through memory.”
The old cafe still exists and is currently undergoing restoration as part of the wider preservation and regeneration of Jeddah’s historic district.
For Najee, the restoration project represents an opportunity to carry his father’s story into the future.
“I want to name (it) Clay Sobia,” he said. “It is a tribute to my father and to a moment that connected a small Jeddah shop with one of the world’s greatest sporting legends.”
