UCLA professor Khaled Abou El Fadl planned to pay tribute to recently deceased Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader and former president Mohamed Morsi during a sermon this month at the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC). But mosque leaders, citing a desire to avoid “divisive political discussions” that don’t “directly affect American Muslims,” allegedly prohibited him from doing so.
In response, an indignant Abou El Fadl posted a rambling 50-minute video on YouTube, in which he praised Morsi as a “martyr,” while calling ICSC leaders “authoritarian and despotic garbage,” “ignorant idiots,” and “an embarrassment to Islam.”
Given the radicalism and blatant anti-Semitism of the fellow Islamists who did mourn Morsi in mosques across the US (see the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s report), it is, in fact, Abou El Fadl who is an embarrassment, both to UCLA and to the field of Middle East studies.
