Who wants Khaled Abou el Fadl dead?
The question has haunted the UCLA Islamic law professor since April, when he says a bullet whizzed past his ear and lodged in a book as he was standing near his living room bookshelf in front of his open front door.
His fears intensified this month, after a news report in the Anaheim-based Al Watan newspaper and other Arabic-language media carried what Abou el Fadl calls a "solicitation of murder" against him. The article reported that Iranian extremists had declared it permissible to spill his blood because the scholar purportedly advised President Bush to support Israel's strike against Lebanon, resist a cease-fire with the Hezbollah militia and block the Islamist movement.
Abou el Fadl, one of the nation's most prominent critics of Saudi Arabia's puritanical practice of Islam known as Wahhabism, called the news report "a total fabrication." He said he has never met or advised Bush, although the White House appointed him to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2003. He also said he opposed the Israeli strike on Lebanon and was highly critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast.
"There is not one iota of truth in it," Abou el Fadl, 42, said of the news report, first published in early August in an Egyptian news outlet, Al-Misriyun, before being reprinted in the Anaheim paper and elsewhere.
But members of the FBI's joint terrorism task force, which independently picked up the news report, were so concerned that they visited Abou el Fadl recently to warn him to take security precautions, the scholar said in an interview last week. He added that he has also met with FBI agents and University of California police, who have begun implementing heightened security measures.
FBI officials declined to comment, although they did not deny Abou el Fadl's account of their visits. The Los Angeles police detective assigned to investigate the April shooting could not be reached for comment.
The editor of Al Watan, a popular Arabic-language weekly newspaper, did not return phone calls for comment. A man who answered the phone at Al Watan's listed number said only that the story was published because "it's news, and we publish news," before hanging up.
