BRITAIN

BRITAIN

The Independent, July 8: The memorial to those who died in the 7/7 London bombings four years ago is exceptionally well-judged. Our public spaces are replete with statues recalling great public figures and monuments to the collective grief at the end of wars. But this is something else. From a distance the group of 52 slender, individually-cast columns communicate a sense of collective loss. But, close up, their separateness honors the individual tragedies that took place. That is what public calamities are: collections of so many personal heartbreaks.

Awe-inspiring

The stainless steel columns are tall enough to be awe-inspiring and yet, as a memorial, they retain a human scale. They are cut off brutally at the top, as were the lives of those they memorialize. They have, as one critic perceptively observed, something of the grandeur of ancient standing stones. Hard steel in soft soil, they speak of the fragility of human life, and of that which endures beyond the grave.

EGYPT

The Egyptian Gazette, Cairo, July 8: The story of 31-year old Egyptian Marwa el-Sherbini who was stabbed to death by a German of a Russian descent in a Dresden courtroom on July 1, sums up the general paradoxical perception of the West on the one hand and Muslims on the other of the image of a veiled woman.

While Marwa’s hijab (headscarf) had provoked the killer as a symbol, in his conviction, of terrorism, the very same hijab has caused her fellow Muslims to grieve over the killing of a religiously “committed” Muslim. Shocked mourners have dubbed her as the “martyr of the veil.” The killer did not see other than her hijab while in fact she was a committed yet open-minded young Muslim, who had achieved athletic distinction as a handball player.

Racist hatred

Marwa had reacted to the insults of the young German in a civilized manner by taking him to court. Yet his racist hatred had stood in the way of his accepting the court ruling that had fined him 750 euros. The incident could be an isolated act, but it does undeniably reflect some Westerners looking at Muslims as inferiors. Such events, whether Muslims commit them against foreigners or vice versa, pinpoint the need for more open and concentrated cross-culture dialogue. Each side has to respect and to tolerate within allowed limits the tradition and ideology of the other. Marwa has been a victim of Islamophobia, which is barring many Westerners from reaping the fruits of tolerance and peaceful co-existence. As much as such fanatics are to blame, blame must be also put on Muslims for not being duly able to unveil the core of Islam.

DENMARK

Politiken, Copenhagen, July 8: A new terrible tragedy is unfolding before our eyes in China.

Several hundred people have been killed and at least a thousand were injured when the Chinese authorities Sunday night crushed a protest in Urumqi, the capital of China’s large Xinjiang province.

This is the worst and bloodiest repression since the violent attacks on the demonstrating students at Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago.

Hard lesson

The Tibetans learned that the hard way last year. Now comes the turn to (China’s) second large minority, the 9 million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

However, Tibet enjoys a degree of attention in the West because of the Dalai Lama.

That is unfortunately not the case with the “autonomous” province of Xinjiang, where the autonomy movement is represented by a 51-year-old woman, Rebiya Kadeer, who after years of torture in Chinese prisons now lives in exile in the United States.