In July 2009, a thirty-two-year-old Muslim woman from Egypt named Mrs. Marwa El-Sherbini was publicly murdered in a German courtroom by a Muslim-hating fanatic who stabbed her eighteen times in front of a packed chamber of horrified witnesses. Marwa had been in the courtroom giving testimony against her attacker for having previously called her a "terrorist" and "Islamist whore" in public while she was pregnant. Adding insult, as she was being publicly murdered in front of the packed German courtroom by a white man; her distraught husband rushed to her side only to be shot himself by a German police officer in the courtroom. … Although she was hailed as the "headscarf martyr" in her native country of Egypt, the case of Marwa El-Sherbini received very little media coverage anywhere else in the world. For many Muslims, this clearly illustrated the growing racist ambivalence toward bias-motivated attacks on women who are visibly Muslim across the Western world.

QUESTION: Why did this case receive little coverage outside Egypt despite being a courtroom murder? Worth investigating media disparities around hate crimes against Muslim women. SEED: A potential essay on how Western media coverage — or lack thereof — of bias crimes against visibly Muslim women reveals racial ambivalence.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of media coverage disparities for crimes against marginalized groups versus mainstream victims. QUESTION: Worth investigating the specific media coverage statistics of this case versus comparable Western victim crimes.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 371