Marwa El-Sherbini, an Egyptian Muslim woman, was brutally murdered in a German Court within the city of Dresden on 1^st July 2009, her only crime was that she wore a headscarf and was a Muslim.

Marwa El-Sherbini was born in 1977 in Alexandria, Egypt. She studied pharmacy and after marriage, moved to Bremen, Germany with her husband, Elwy Ali Okaz in 2005. After having their first child three years later, the couple moved to Dresden with their son. On 21 August 2008, Marwa got involved in a quarrel with a man named Alex Weins (born in Russia) over the issue as to whose child should be using the playground's swing (Marwa’s son or Weins’s niece). The quarrel intensified and Wiens began shouting verbal abuse at El-Sherbini. El-Sherbini who was wearing a headscarf, was called "Islamist", "terrorist" and "slut". Police was called upon by El-Sherbini and both Weins and Marwa were driven away in one of the police vehicles.

Weins was later charged with criminal defamation and was fined €330 which he refused to pay. The court later tried him and fined him another €780 in November 2008. During the proceeding, Weins, in order to lessen the gravity of his insulting offence, stated that "people like her" were not really human beings and therefore incapable of being insulted. The public prosecutor appealed the verdict, aiming at a custodial sentence due to the openly xenophobic character of the incident.

On July 1 2009, an appeal hearing was held at the regional court in Dresden where Weins was the defendant and Marwa appeared as witness for the prosecution along with her husband and son. No security officials were present and no security search of the individuals was carried out as it was routine in the concerned case.

The entire proceedings saw Weins’s making harsh statements against Muslims. He stated that the Court should deport all the Muslims to their respective countries following the 9/11 attacks. Following Weins’s defence statement, Marwa testified to the Court. She was not intending to wait until the end of the hearing and wanted to leave; as she was leaving the Court room with her husband and son, she was intercepted by Weins who all of a sudden attacked her with a long blade kitchen knife, stabbing her more than 15 times in her torso. Her husband, Elwy Ali Okaz, while trying to save her was also stabbed almost 16 times to the head and upper body. Following the incident, an alarm was raised and Security officials reached the scene, but to Elwy Okaz’s bad luck, the security official shot him in his leg thinking that he was the attacker. The confusion was later clarified and the Weins was apprehended.

Weins, after a long trial, was found guilty of the murder of El-Sherbini and the attempted murder of Okaz, and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 11 November 2009.

The judgment in this case was delayed because the requested medical information from Russian authorities that arrived 9 November 2009 attested that Weins suffered from "undifferentiated schizophrenia" since 2000, thereby requiring additional testimony by a medical expert witness.

Why was the case delayed in an “open and shut” case, where the crime was conducted in the court room with the judges as the witnesses?

The defence in the case reasoned that “the killing was in the heat of the moment and that the defendant may have a paranoid personality disorder.”

Anti-Muslim Fanatics like Alex Weins and Anders Behring Breivik (Muslim’s mass killer) are usually given a relaxed verdict whereas if these extremists would have been Muslims, they might have been hanged to death several times after terming them as “terrorists”.

The “Hijab” is used by Muslim women in order to provide privacy. Rather it is seen as a threat in many countries. Is it a threat because the Western world associates Muslims with terrorism? What is terrorism? According to the United States Department of Defense, terrorism is “the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”

Well, I may not be good at interpreting such sophisticated terminologies but I guess the crimes of Breivik and Weins may qualify as terrorism under this definition. Then why doesn’t the United States classify Norwegians or Russians as terrorists. It is not that I am favoring the acts of the so-called Talibans but if that group is termed as terrorist than why spare the others by stating that he suffers from some “psychological disorder” and take the case to a personal level whereby a Muslim offender would not be blamed on personal grounds, he would rather be labeled terrorist religious grounds.

Why has the Hijab been deemed unlawful in many countries like France and Turkey? What is the harm that a thin piece of cloth can inflict? Why aren’t the nuns asked to refrain from wearing their religious veil if it is such a big threat? Probably because they do not qualify under the appropriate heading of “Muslim terrorists”.