LONDON: Athlete, model and the first Muslim woman to win a boxing title for England Ramla Ali arrived to the UK as a war refugee.
Today, Ali has her sights set on the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, but this hasn’t stopped her from finding time to volunteer.
One day a week she teaches self-defense classes to “predominately hijab-wearing” women, she said, between the ages of 20-40, in south London.
“It’s a safe space for them, free of men,” Ali told CNN.com.
She has also helped set up Somalia’s boxing federation in Mogadishu, and became the first boxer in history to have represented Somalia in the Women’s World Championships in New Delhi (IND) in 2018.
Ali doesn’t know her exact date of birth. Her family had fled Somalia in the early 1990s, after her eldest brother, who was just nine at the time, died as a result of a grenade being thrown into their home.
Fearing for their lives, the family fled Mogadishu via a crowded boat to Kenya, before finally settling in London.
She won the 2015 Novice National Championships and then the 2016 England Boxing Elite National Championship.
For a long time her family didn’t know she was boxing and her parents didn’t even know when she won the national title!
Being the first Muslim boxing champion was not exactly the future Ramla’s parents had imagined for her.
“My mum… in her eyes to be a good Muslim girl you have to be fully covered. But I think just different things work for different people. It was the fear of community my mother had. For her it would mostly be: ‘What would people think?,” she told Tokyo2020.org.
She started boxing by chance, as a result of feeling overweight and being bullied at school.
“I started going to the gym. Back then there was no Instagram to tell you that these are workouts you should do so you just kind of had to guess what you are doing and to me it wasn’t fun as a kid. I did boxing class and I was like: ‘Wow, this is amazing, I love it.”
“I didn’t have friends in school, but I made friends in boxing. It gave me community, it gave me a second family.”
