This article will discuss the outrage that the Egyptian media and public expressed with regard to the murder of Egyptian Marwa Sherbini and the way the case was handled in Germany. It has been pointed out that this reaction was driven by an unfounded fear of generalised German racism and Islamophobia, which was in turn exploited by both Islamists and the Egyptian government.

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Last week, Egyptian citizens, politicians and media expressed their unanimous support for the severe verdict that German Alex Wiens received for his brutal murder of Egyptian pharmacist Marwa Sherbini in Dresden. Although it is understandable that the case shocked and outraged Egyptians, both Western and progressive Arab journalists and bloggers have voiced criticism of the rhetoric that was adopted by many Egyptian media and protesters in the context of the murder and its aftermath. Sherbini was dubbed the “martyr of the veil”, while newspaper articles and protest banners and chants were rife with blanket accusations of an “Islamophobic Germany”. In Alexandria, Sherbini's hometown, local pharmacies called for a boycott of German products. Outside the German Embassy and in the al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, demonstrators described Germany as “a civilisation of tyrants”. A performance of the Dresden Orchestra in Cairo's Opera House was postponed. In Iran, mass protests took place.

It must be said that the way the German authorities and media responded to the murder left much to be desired. It was not until days after that newspapers started reporting sparingly on the incident, and although Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her sympathies to Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, she did not comment publicly. This led a number of Muslims in Egypt and beyond to interpret a crime perpetrated by a single hateful man as an attack on Islam in general, which in turn highlighted the fact that “the West” has a serious image problem in the Middle East. In numerous Egyptian writings, suspicions are expressed that those present in the courtroom at the time of the murder had purposely waited until it was too late before stepping in to stop Wiens, that the policeman who shot Sherbini's husband in the leg in the chaos of the moment had deliberately aimed to injure him, and that the media were slow in picking up on the story out of disinterest for a Muslim's life.

Seeing that this tone is found in the rhetoric of both Islamist websites (such as the Muslim Brotherhood's) and newspapers that sympathetic to the Mubarak government (such as the Egyptian Gazette), it can be concluded that Sherbini's murder was exploited by both Egyptian Islamists and the Egyptian government for their own purposes. For Islamists, it became a rallying cry to mobilise the masses against a pro-Western regime. For the government, it was used as a way to deflect local frustrations onto an external enemy.

Journalists and bloggers critical of this rhetoric have pointed out that even if racism and Islamophobia exist in Germany, the country has made a great effort to counter these by means of numerous anti-Nazi initiatives on a governmental and non-governmental level. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that racism is widespread in Egypt itself too. And cynical as it may sound, it is common that local media pay less attention to cases in which their public is unlikely to identify emotionally with the victim to a great extent. In the same way that Sherbini's murder did not immediately make headlines in every German newspaper, murders of foreigners in Egypt rarely lead to mass protests by Egyptians. All in all, the media reporting and popular response concerning this tragic case highlight the importance of avoiding generalisation and unfounded paranoia, as well as of not allowing specific incidents to be misused to further governments' and political/religious movements' ends.

“'Martyr of veil' killer gets life”, The Egyptian Gazette, 12 November 2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8355921.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8144154.stm

http://bikyamasr.com/?p=1483

http://www.ikhwanweb.org/article.php?id=21446

http://www.ikhwanweb.org/article.php?id=20867

“The police officer who happened to be in the court aimed and fired his pistol towards the husband of the headscarf martyr deliberately causing serious injury.”

“The Egyptian report stated there has not been any information about how long it took the judge to actually set off the alarm that was in the reach of his hand.”