Mursi or Morsi

I don't think you can have a schwa in a stressed syllable, can you?

In the system of transliteration that most scholars use, it would be mursi. There are not two separate u and o vowels in Arabic, which only has six vowel phonemes: short a, i, and u and their long equivalents. But they can be realized in different ways depending on the environment. Whether (former) President Morsi's pronunciation of his name is more like mursi or morsi is more than I can say. But apparently when he writes it English he writes Mohamed Morsi. (A scholar would make that Muhammad Mursi.)

Thanks, that explains it. Borrowed an Arabic textbook from the library once, but couldn't get past the first chapter.

It occurs to me that (a) I should have said "writes it in Roman characters" not "in English"; and (b) that the preference for o over u may be because they are thinking of French rather than English. The French u is quite different from the Arabic sound, and ou (e.g. Moursi) may suggest a longer vowel than the Arabic. French was the preferred European language among the Egyptian elite until a generation or two ago.

I think not only the French u is quite different from the Arabic, also the English one, at least in this particular environment: If I was just going by English words spelled similarly, I would pronounce "Mursi" like "mercy", rather than "Moorsi"

CNN spells it Morsy.