Only a few days stand between the incident that took place at the Fort Hood base in the American State of Texas and the verdict that will be issued by a German court next Wednesday in the case of the murder of Egyptian doctor Marwa El-Sherbini, returning the issue of the West's view of Islam to the forefront of events once again. Despite the great dissimilarity between the two crimes, as well as the difference in time and place, their repercussions and the reactions to them bring to memory the narrative of Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel “Crime and Punishment”, on the background of the attempt made by some Islamophobic circles in Europe and the US to justify the murder of the Egyptian victim, to search for pretexts and reasons to alleviate the sentence of the murder suspect, and to reach faulty conclusions saying that the suspect suffered from terrible psychological pressures and that circumstances drove him to commit the crime! It is exactly like the protagonist of Dostoyevsky's novel, who accepts the hardship and hunger that surrounded him, after having felt bitterness and pain, and becomes motivated to take risks, as if seeking to commit the crime to prove his superiority. These people consider that it would be sufficient for the punishment of the perpetrator of the Dresden murder to be like that of the novel's main character: to be excluded from society as insane for thinking he could rid the world of evil. One following the details of the case would discover that Marwa Sherbini's killer was not suffering from dire social or living conditions that would drive him to storm the courtroom and murder a veiled Muslim lady. Rather, he had chosen Islam as the enemy and the victim as the target, without there being a reason for this in any hardship he has gone through. The novel's protagonist considered ridding the world of evil a motive to shed blood, a motive not strictly personal but rather rooted in bitter social conditions and in the pain and misery of others. Does this apply to Marwa Sherbini's murderer? The novel's protagonist is very emotional, highly impressionable and extremely sensitive, with a tendency towards introversion and social seclusion, who does not like to mix with people and talk to them, who did not have friends even in college, and whose feelings of alienation and loneliness increase to the extent of taking the shape of disgust from others, even the people closest to him. In Dresden, on the other hand, the perpetrator lived a normal life, had relatives and friends he interacted with, and was the neighbor of the Egyptian victim, with whom he had had an altercation and an argument, forming the resolve to get rid of her, so that he, not the world, could be relieved of her, as Marwa Sherbini was not one of the reasons behind the tragedies and pain of the world. It is true that the crime reflected the frightening influence of Western publicity being carried out by those who call for discrimination and by the enemies of Islam, yet the verdict which will be issued the day after tomorrow would perhaps represent a deterrent to these people who maintain their stances which arouse hatred and terrorism, or could drive them to more hatred and other kinds of terrorism. The issue is contingent on the extent of the role that must be played by the “wise” in the world at every level to reduce tension and defuse hatred not just by speaking in front of cameras, but rather by adopting measures and policies that bring people together rather than apart, and that equate rather than distinguish between races, religions and nationalities. Regardless of the motives behind the tragic incident that took place at the Fort Hood base in Texas, it did not take long for the crime, which there too deserves punishment, to be exploited by those who call for hatred in order to achieve the same goal, which in turn will cause other disasters, tragedies and crimes in the future, as it is sufficient to point to the description of the officer and doctor who committed the crime as a “practicing Muslim” for vengeful motives to be created among non-Muslim Americans and Westerners against all that is Muslim. We cannot here practice what we rejected in the case of Marwa Sherbini, by searching for reasons and pretexts to justify the crime merely because the perpetrator is Muslim. The matter should be left to the American investigators and to the justice system there, yet this does not mean giving free rein to exploiting the ignorance of people in the West about Islam and generating massive plans of antagonism and hatred that would result in more crimes between the two sides.
