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Friday, June 15, 2012

When the headscarf becomes a death sentence, Islam, Women and Feminism, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam, Women and Feminism
When the headscarf becomes a death sentence
By Mukul Kesavan

The events that led to her murder began with a playground dispute. She became involved in a dispute with Alex W., a Russian immigrant of ethnic German descent, about whose turn it was to use the swing: his niece’s or her son’s. The argument became ugly when he tried to pull off her headscarf and called her a terrorist and an Islamist whore. He was fined by a district court but his defence that people like Marwa were less than human and therefore couldn’t really be insulted, was so provocative that the public prosecutor pressed for more severe punishment.

In the subsequent trial Alex W. walked across the courtroom and stabbed Marwa 18 times as her three-year-old son watched. When her husband ran to her defence, he suffered stab wounds and was shot in the leg by a policeman who mistook him for the assailant. Marwa and her unborn child died in the courtroom; her husband’s condition remains critical.

The German newspapers that did mention the murder, did so on their back pages and confined themselves to reporting that a woman had been killed in a courtroom over a playground dispute. There was concern expressed about security in German courtrooms but no mention of the racist context of the murder. It was only when her burial provoked outraged demonstrations in Alexandria, that a handful of news providers—the Guardian, AP, the Huffington Post—gave the story some play. Even today, if you Google Marwa el-Sherbini, you get pages and pages of websites in the Arab and Muslim world; for all the interest shown by the European and American media or the German government, the murder might never have happened.

http://newageislam.com/when-the-headscarf-becomes-a-death-sentence/islam,-women-and-feminism/d/1686


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