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Mourning Marwa
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There are some stories that are so heartbreaking, so horrifying, that it’s difficult to know how to even begin telling them. The story of Marwa el-Sherbini, the woman now being called a “headscarf martyr,” is one of those stories.
It begins in Egypt, where Marwa was a former national handball champion. Last year, Marwa and her husband Elvi Ali Okaz were living in Germany with their son, Mustafa. One day, Marwa, dressed in a hijab, took Mustafa to the park to play on the swings. When she asked a man to let her son sit on a swing, he responded by calling her a “terrorist” and an “Islamist whore.” She took him to court for the insult and he was fined, a decision he later appealed. Last week during the appeal, as a pregnant Marwa was on the witness stand, he walked across the courtroom and stabbed her 18 times. Her husband Elvi and Mustafa, now three years old, were in the courtroom at the time, and when Elvi ran over to help Marwa, the man stabbed him in the leg. Court police also mistook Elvi for the assailant and shot him, critically wounding him.
The story is apparently difficult for the press to tell, too. There has been very little coverage of the killing, which is striking when compared to the saturation of coverage of the equally tragic murder of Neda Agha Soltan during the protests in Iran a fortnight ago. As one columnist wrote at the online Middle East news site Menassat,
“The absence of Marwa’s story from the mainstream media and the failure to start a debate about the immediate dangers of present European anti-Muslim racism shows the depth of the problem and draws us to expect a gloomy future for Muslims in Europe. Muslims like Neda only get to the news if their story serves the dominant narrative that presents Islam as the primary threat to freedom, while Muslims like Marwa who expose the pervasive racism of the West and challenge the existing stereotypes fail to get their story told.”
In addition to being sparse, news coverage of the event has been spotty, with some agencies reporting that the man’s name was Axel and others reporting that his name was Alex. Some reports claim that the attacker was Marwa’s neighbour; others do not mention any relationship between the man and the family. The German government, which has been criticized for its minimal response to the murder, has defended itself, with a spokesperson calling the event “an abhorrent deed” and stating that Chancellor Merkel plans to meet with the Egyptian President to discuss it at this week’s G8 summit.
In her native Egypt, Marwa is being honoured as a “headscarf martyr.” Her murder and the apparent lack of response from the German government and the press impelled thousands of Egyptians to march in protest alongside her coffin this week. Those leading the protests, including her brother, believe that her murder and the near-silence that followed are symbolic of Europe’s increasing, and increasingly violent, intolerance towards Muslims.
Stories like this one, stories of senseless violence, are difficult to tell, and are in some ways impossible to fully understand. But they need to be told, and their meaning needs to be grappled with. The murder of Marwa, like the murder of Neda and like countless other acts of senseless violence holds a mirror up to society. We might not like what we see, but we can’t ignore its existence. We must tell the difficult stories, the stories of violence and hatred and ignorance, the stories that make us ashamed of our countrymen and afraid for the future of our culture. We must tell them, we must listen to them and we must begin to make sense of that which seems senseless.
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