An excerpt of the Friday khutba of Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law on September 30, 2019:
"Every imam - and this is a message to all out there - every imam that defends an unjust ruler, that defends unjust imprisonments, that defends torture. Torture! Torture! That apologizes and justifies governments that rape women in political prisons. Every imam that does that - you know what it is that they are effectively saying? - they are saying that there is no philosophical justification for the Prophet Muhammad SAWS to be the last prophet. Because the way it all works, is that I have perfected.. here is God's perfected message, the complete message. Now that the prophecy has ended, your ummah should carry the torch. But if the ummah doesn't carry the torch, then what happens to the torch of the Prophet SAWS?
Do you see why this is a disaster? Do you see why this is a mind-numbing thing? When the Prophet says, okay, in the final day, in the hereafter, I have perfected the message, finally human beings have been elevated through Ibrahim and Musa and Ismail and Yaqub.. and so on.. have been elevated to understand the difference between uboodiyah - submission - to God and the degradation of submission to a fellow human being. Alhamdulillah, I have taught - we prophets - through generations taught you the message. Now what did you do as the great inheritors of Islam?
And you say, you know what, as Muslims what we have instituted is dictatorship, destitution, and suffering. Shameful! Untenable! Miserable!
The reason I say this is because this is our fate. This is our responsibility, this is what we are about. But as I speak right now there are people in countries like Egypt who are trying to remove a fascist - FASCIST - dictator called Abdul Fattah El Sisi. A fascist dictator who has imprisoned over sixty thousand people. Who has executed - murdered - thousands of people. And - and this is my specialty - who has practiced the worst forms of torture, including raping women and political prisoners. Of course, he labels anyone that he arrests and persecutes ikhwan or terrorist, including people who have lived their lives being anti-ikhwan like Professor Hassan Nafa', who was recently arrested and charged as a terrorist in Egypt.
I can't give this khutba without thinking of how many brave souls are going to the streets and are going to end up thrown in a political prison or murdered - killed by the security forces. If I was in Egypt, then it would become my moral obligation to go and try to remove one of the worst pharaohs Egypt has seen in its history, in its long history. One of the most corrupt and brutal pharaohs that Egypt has ever seen.
But because I am in America, the part that concerns me is that my president calls this fascist "my favorite dictator" and sits there and says, "there used to be chaos in Egypt before Abdel Fattah El Sisi came, now Egypt is okay." And I know that my president doesn't care about democracy in the Muslims world. But even worst, doesn't care about justice in the Muslims world. I know that my president is happy when he sees Muslims unjust, backwards, retarded, barbaric. It fulfills his world view. It affirms... I handled cases with a lot of New York, high level attorneys - commercial cases. And high level commercial cases in London. and one of the things that struck me about this high level attorney culture that get paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars for each hour, and so on and so forth is how thoroughly racist they are. As they worked on cases with Saudi money, Emirati money, and Qatari money, they at the same time looked at their clients as barbaric people - as nothing - simply because they are Muslim.
The world is not going to do it for us, as Muslims, if we Muslims accept the likes of Abdel Fattah El Sisi as representative of one of the largest Muslim countries on earth, Egypt, and we accept that our American president supports and aids a fascist dictator like El Sisi.
Then what are we about as an Ummah?"
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