Marwa el-Sherbini was killed during a hearing at a court of law in Dresden, Germany, by a man against whom she had testified after being insulted for wearing an Islamic headscarf.
Marwa el-Sherbini, 32, stood in a Dresden courtroom on July 1, 2009, testifying against a man charged with racially insulting her. Then the defendant leapt across the courtroom, and stabbed her with a knife, no fewer than 18 times. As her husband, Eliv Ali Okaz, ran to her aid, he was shot by police who mistook him for the attacker. Now Okaz lies in a critical condition in intensive care at a Dresden hospital. Mustafa, their three-year-old son, witnessed the entire ordeal.
This hideous incident all started with a headscarf. Last August, in a local park, Sherbini, an Egyptian, who has lived in Germany with her young family since 2003, working as a pharmacist, got into an argument with ‘Alex W’, an unemployed stock controller from Russia. Their dispute concerned whose turn it was - his niece or her three-year-old son Mustafa - to have a go on the swings at the playground there. The Russian then called her a “terrorist†and an “Islamist whoreâ€, for wearing a hijab.
Despite the dramatic nature of this anti-Islamic attack, this case has received very little attention in the western press and has provoked Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world to strongly condemn Germany’s “muted†response to the incident. There, much of the debate has centred on the technical details of courtroom security.
The attack comes only weeks after President Sarkozy publicly condemned the burka as a “sign of subservience†and encouraged parliamentary discussions to ban Muslim residents in France from wearing them in public.
