After 9/11 governments rushed to reassure Muslims that they were not under attack... only madrasas, Islamic governance, Islamic Schools, Islamic charities, Islamic organisations, Islamic symbols, Islamic preachers, Islamic canonical law and a few Muslim countries were under attack. This "we're-not-attacking-you-but-we-really-are" tactic extended to the Niqab.

Everytime "evil" Muslims were mentioned the imagery of the Niqab (or Burqa) was not far behind. Within a short period of time the public were conditioned to seeing the Niqab as not something "different" but something "dangerous." The arguments ranged from the pseudo-intellectual (the Niqab as a barrier to multiculturalism) to the ridiculous (women wearing Burqas have been accused of kidnapping Maddy McCann.)

It was on the background of this climate of hate and intolerance that a young mother was stabbed to death in Germany. Her crime? Wearing the headscarf. A man had hurled abuse at her in the street and threatened her. Not accepting that she should be treated this way simply due to her faith, she took him to court. (Read on...)

Whilst in court, within the heart of the justice system itself, her attacker took out an 18 cm knife and proceeded to stab her multiple times. When her husband intervened he too was stabbed. When the police finally arrived they mistakenly shot her husband instead of the attacker. Marwa Al Sherbini was the first direct fatality in the West of the Niqab wars. As long as the media, governments and certain people of the Western world keep looking at Muslim women as a sub-species that require their own specific "freedom" in order to be given the same dignity as human beings - I doubt she will be the last.