From Germany

Searching Twitter for #Marwa you will find a lot of disappointment expressed by Egyptians and others that mourn Marwa El-Sherbini. She was stabbed to death in Dresden Germany. Her death obviously is not remembered strongly enough by the world community and especially by us Germans.

I mourn Marwa’s awful death and all its painful circumstances. And I certainly understand those people's disappointment. But I would like to ease it at least in such a way that no further damage is done to the relation between Muslims and Christians.

A huge number of German citizens are Muslims (3.3 out of 82.1 Million says Wikipedia). Most of them are descendants of Turkish immigrants and live her in the second and third generation. According to polls they love their country and are content with their situation – sometimes even more than the native Germans.

Muslim women with headscarves are often seen in German streets. Marwa did not die because she wore one. Maybe with her scarf she had problems in finding certain jobs, as some reports say. But this would first of all be part of a general problem of someone who applies for a job wearing a regional dress of his home country – a turban, a long African gown, even leather trousers as the Bavarians, a German tribe, sometimes wear. Admittedly, a woman with a headscarf has the additional problem that Germans might see it as a sign of a forced-upon limitation of her rights as a woman. Nevertheless more and more young women here show their headscarves with a strong self-consciousness and find it increasingly accepted as a sign of faith and also as a sign of freedom from being exposed as a sexual object.

The German state was blamed for the week security in court. When the police arrived they shot at Marwa’s husband instead of the murderer. This is thought to be a result of secret racism: in a dangerous situation you aim at dark people first. Apart from seeing not much darkness in the photo above I know from my visits to court (my job demands them once in a while) that the policemen there are often young and inexperienced people. My guess is that the policeman aimed at nobody and shot in the floor or the air. It is difficult anyway to separate murderer and victim with a gunshot as long as they are closely together.

I will report in this blog about the results of investigations. Certainly they will show that the controls at the entrance of the court building were weak. In my hometown court there is an airport-like arch and an x-ray device for bags (where they always find my nail scissors and make me deposit them there). The murderer would not have got a knife through this.

Nobody can deny that there is hatred against foreigners in part of the population here. In Dresden’s State Parliament the right wing National Democratic Party (NPD) has seats. The murderer of Marwa obviously was one of those right wing nationalistic people (strange enough, he was a foreigner himself). Nevertheless painting Germany as a country with a strong tendency towards xenophobia and towards hate especially for Muslims does not only put a blame on my country that it does not deserve after giving 3.3. Million Muslims a home. Even worse, it darkens the hope of many people around the world that there will ever be freedom, equality and brotherhood, the ideals of the French Revolution from 1789, for all of us.

I have been following the events in Tehran via Twitter and cannot separate the people in Tehran, Dresden and Cairo. hat is why I say: If Germany, almost 65 years after the Hitler-nightmare and with 60 years of democracy is still a dark and wicked country – what hope do the people of Tehran have if they want to overcome their own nightmare and find new ways of a democracy for themselves? What positive example have they to foll0w?

My wish for peace between Muslims and Christians is embedded in the other urgent wish that new generations of Muslims will find new ways to unite their old faith with modern forms of government. The Turks successfully show the road, Lebanon is struggling, Iraq is (one may add inshallah) on a good way, others like Marwa’s Egypt still have long ways to go.

They all, we all need encouragement. I hope that my country will carry on to be one, even with Marwa's bloodstains in its ground that should not be forgotten.