Dr. Marwa Al-Sherbini probably never thought she would one day be killed by a German of Russian origin. Nor could her husband have imagined he would come under fire from a police officer inside the courtroom for no reason other than that his skin was not white enough. It certainly never entered their minds that their child would be put in public care while his mother was on her death bed and father receiving treatment in a hospital.
Al-Sherbini filed a lawsuit in a German court against the youth who shouted at her and called her a terrorist because she was wearing hijab. The man reacted when she asked him to give way to her little child. The court had been looking into the case for the last few months. Surprisingly, the defendant managed to bring a knife into the courtroom and attack Al-Sherbini. Within a few seconds, he had stabbed her a number of times. Her husband was also injured by a policeman’s gunshots because the policeman thought, according to one report, that her husband was the assailant.
The whole story has a nasty racist undertone, especially since the defendant abused her and accused her of being a terrorist, a description used for many Muslims in Western countries and sometimes even in their own countries.
Racism forced many German newspapers to keep quiet about the crime that took place in a courtroom in front of a judge and other officials. Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, asked why the murder of a woman in hijab was sidelined for a week? But the German prosecutors took an extremely different stand when they ordered a media blackout on the incident.
The German magazine Focus published a report saying that the youth killed the woman after careful planning. In other words, his attack was not a hasty reaction.
If the public prosecution had wished to deal with the incident with fairness and objectivity, it would not have banned publication of reports or comments about the crime. Usually no reports on murders are made until judicial authorities have moved against the accused. And surely, no one — except for police or official guards — should be allowed to carry a weapon into a courtroom.
Egyptians organized big street rallies to protest the crime. Peter Heine, professor of Islamic sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin, justified the Egyptian protests for three reasons; first Marwa was wearing hijab; second the police officer fired on her husband in the courtroom; and third the lukewarm response of the German government toward the incident, according to a report carried by the German newspaper Bild.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy may use the incident to support his call for a ban on niqab, which is another form of hijab, as women’s Islamic dress could trigger racist feelings and encourage people to commit crimes against Muslims, cause problems for authorities and create tension in relations between Western countries and the Muslim world. The German official and media response favored Sarkozy’s stand.
If Al-Sherbini had been a German pharmacist filing a lawsuit against someone who had insulted her in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or any other Muslim country and then the defendant had gone to court with a knife and stabbed her 18 times in 30 seconds and if the newspapers, government departments and human rights organizations had kept quiet on the incident, there would have been a completely different scenario. These are difficult questions every intelligent person wants to get answers to in order to know how far anti-Muslim racism has gripped many European countries.
This is not a call for any protest, which will do more harm than good, but this is a call for all government and nongovernment organizations, especially the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and other international organizations to take a firm stand about the incident in order to give a strong message to German political and media authorities.
