Turkey’s President has cut short his trip to the US and will not attend the funeral of boxer Muhammad Ali, his office said Friday, amid reports of a rift with the ceremony’s organizers.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had specially flown to Louisville in the southern US state of Kentucky to say farewell to Ali, who the Turkish president is known to have admired hugely as a committed Muslim and civil rights campaigner.

Erdogan on Thursday attended a prayer ceremony for Ali and had been due to attend the funeral on Friday along with several other high profile political leaders.

But the president’s office said that Erdogan left the United States for Turkey late Thursday after attending the prayer ceremony and joining a Ramadan fast-breaking dinner with the US diaspora of Meskhetian Turks who were expelled from their homeland by Stalin in the 1940s.

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Cold Turkey: Erdogan (pictured wearing tie next to Turkey's religious minister Mehmet Gormez) was due to speak at today's service but was cut out due to 'shortage of program space'. In addition his request to to lay a cloth from the Kaaba on Ali’s coffin during yesterday's Muslim ceremony was denied

Erdogan and King Abdullah II of Jordan were scheduled to speak at the champion boxer's service on Friday, but was cut due to lack of program space.

'It's not about who they are, it's about the fact that we just don't have room on the program for them,' family spokesman Bob Gunnell said, adding that their representatives were 'gracious and understood' when told.

In addition, The Dogan news agency quoted presidential sources as saying funeral organizers refused to allow Erdogan to lay a cloth from the Kaaba on Ali’s coffin during the ceremony.

Erdogan and the Sunni cleric who heads Turkey’s religious affairs agency, Mehmet Gormez, had also wanted to give readings from the Quran but were not allowed to, it added.

The Turkish president’s bodyguards and US Secret Service agents also clashed briefly while he was in Louisville.

During his trip, Erdogan was full of praise for Ali, hailing him as a fighter not just in the ring but for Muslims in general.

'While running from success to success in the rings, he also became the voice of the oppressed and victims along with Muslims from every corner of the world',he said.

Erdogan’s lightning visit to the US also caused consternation in Turkey, with Erdogan leaving the day after a bomb attack in Istanbul claimed by Kurdish militants that killed 11 people.

ERDOGAN STRIKES AGAIN: ROUND-UP OF THIN-SKINNED TURKEY PRESIDENT'S MOST CONTROVERSIAL AND OUTRAGEOUS BEHAVIOR It should come as no real surprise that the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan abandoned the Muhammad Ali funeral after his demands were not met - he is famous for outrageous and unpredictable behavior. While he enjoys a loyal support among Turkey's conservative, Muslim base, outside the country outrage grows over his silencing of critics, often by force. Nearly 2,000 journalists, academics, cartoonists and others cases have faced the Turkish justice system for insulting Mr. Erdogan. A Dutch journalist who wrote a column in April critical of the president and his government’s growing crackdown on freedom of expression was taking from her summer home in Turkey and questioned by police. In February this year he even had a 13-year-old boy arrested by anti-terror teams for ‘insulting the President on Facebook’. In 2014 he banned Twitter in Turkey after a video surfaced that he had previously tried to block. In April this year he sued a German comedian for reciting a satirical poem about him on German television that slammed Turkey’s crackdown on the press and its Kurdish population. But perhaps most concerning are Erdogan’s views on women. Here we list some of his most controversial remarks: ON MOTHERHOOD ‘These days you see they say one (child) is enough, or two is enough. Make at least three, look the conditions have gotten easier. The country needs this’ ‘Motherhood should never take a back seat to a woman's position in her career’ ‘A woman who refuses motherhood by saying, 'I work,' is in fact denying her womanhood’ ‘Our religion has given women a stature, the position of motherhood. It lays heaven at mothers' feet. The bottom of a mother's feet should be kissed. A mother is something else. And its stature is unreachable’ ‘Some people understand this and others don't. For example you can't explain this to feminists. They reject motherhood.’ ‘Motherhood now is easy. You get a disposable diaper. Fold it, throw it away, get a new one and carry on. That's the situation now, ON EQUALITY ‘What women need is to have equivalence of worth rather than equality -- in other words justice," Erdogan said at the International Women and Justice Summit in November 2014. ‘You cannot make men and women equal," he said. ‘That is against creation. Their natures are different. Their dispositions are different’. ON CHILD REARING ‘These days you see they say one (child) is enough, or two is enough. Make at least three, look the conditions have gotten easier. The country needs this’ ON BREAST-FEEDING ‘Family planning, birth control, these are not things that a Muslim family should consider’ ‘Whatever God says, whatever the prophet says, that is the road we must go down. The first duty here belongs to mothers’ Advertisement