Mustafa Ali Recalls Briefly Losing His First Name During WWE Run

In an interview with Chris Van Vliet for Insight (via Fightful), Mustafa Ali spoke about briefly getting his name changed during his time in WWE, which saw him simply called ‘Ali’. It happened in March 2019 and his name was changed back later that year.

He said: “When you do live events, these producers, they write reports. This is during the babyface run, I think I’m working with Shinsuke Nakamura or something like that. One portion of the crowd is chanting, ‘Mustafa’ and the other portion of the crowd is chanting, ‘Ali’. It’s just a weird chant and it just died out. It happened a few nights so that got written in the report. So whoever makes the decisions, I’m assuming it was Vince at the time, just said let’s call him Ali. That’s how I lost my name. I think Road Dogg called and he was like, ‘Hey, I just wanna double check, Mustafa, it’s not like a family — does it mean something to you?’ I go, well, the name means like the chosen one. It means from the people, like this is the guy that’s going to represent. So it means something to me, sure, but I don’t want to lie to you. ‘Okay cool man, we’re gonna just call you Ali now, this is what happened, this is the feedback we got. I don’t think there are any ill intentions, they want you to win, they want you to make money, you know? We just think it’s easier.’ Okay yeah, rock and roll. I go, ‘Well, do I have a say in this?’ He goes, ‘Well, no not really.’ [laughs]”