🇸🇾Nujeen
Mustafa

She had never been to school. Because of her cerebral palsy, the Syrian education system had no place for her, and so she had spent her childhood in the family apartment in Manbij, a city in northern Syria, teaching herself. The instrument of her education was an unlikely one: American soap operas, broadcast on satellite television. She watched them obsessively, for years, and through them she acquired something extraordinary — a working knowledge of English, delivered in the accents of Californian afternoon drama, that would eventually make her one of the most articulate voices of the Syrian refugee crisis. When the ISIS siege came to Manbij in 2014, and when her family joined the great human tide moving toward Europe, Nujeen Mustafa crossed one of the most dangerous borders in the world — in a wheelchair.

She was born in 1999 in Manbij, a city that would become a brutal theater of the Syrian civil war. Her cerebral palsy meant that she could not walk, could not attend school, could not access many of the ordinary structures of a child's life in Syria. What she could do was read, watch, listen, and think. The apartment became her world, and she filled it with knowledge absorbed from wherever she could reach: books her siblings brought home, news broadcasts, the television programs that opened a window onto an America she had never seen and a language she could not yet speak but which she could, with patience and obsessive repetition, learn to understand and eventually to use.

When the family fled, she was fifteen years old. The journey from Syria to Germany — through Turkey, across the Aegean by boat, through the Balkans on foot and by bus — is one that has been made by millions of people in conditions of fear and exhaustion. For most of them, it required physical endurance. For Nujeen, it required something that went beyond endurance: it required that the world accommodate a wheelchair through terrain and bureaucratic systems designed for able-bodied people who could stand in queues, climb stairs, and cross uneven ground. At every border, at every checkpoint, on every boat, on every stretch of road, she was dependent on others in ways that imposed a particular kind of vulnerability. She was also, throughout it all, paying attention. Taking notes in her head.

The journey was covered by journalists who encountered the family on the road. The image of a young woman in a wheelchair, crossing Europe as a refugee, was a story that broke through the abstraction of the crisis and made it specific and human in a way that statistics never can. A segment on the BBC reached John Oliver, who featured her on Last Week Tonight in 2015, bringing her story to a global audience of millions. She arrived in Germany and was eventually resettled. And then she did something no one expected: she wrote a book.

Published in 2016, co-written with journalist Christina Lamb, Nujeen: One Girl's Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair became an international bestseller. It is a memoir of extraordinary range — part account of the journey, part portrait of a Syrian childhood, part meditation on what it means to be a disabled person in a world that is indifferent to disability when it is also managing a humanitarian crisis. The voice is warm, witty, observant, and intellectually curious in a way that surprises readers who expect trauma memoir and receive instead something closer to an adventure story told by someone who had thought very carefully about what she was experiencing.

In 2019, she made history by becoming the first disabled person ever to brief the United Nations Security Council — the most powerful deliberative body in the world, a room where the fates of countries are decided. She spoke about the intersection of disability and conflict, about the particular vulnerability of disabled people in war zones, about the absence of their voices in the discussions that determine their futures. She was twenty years old. She had been to school for not a single day of her life. She had learned English from daytime television. The Security Council listened.

She received the Human Rights Watch Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism and was named to the BBC's 100 Women list in 2018. She continues to speak, to write, and to advocate — a young woman who crossed the most dangerous journey of her generation in a wheelchair and arrived, not diminished, but with more to say than almost anyone else who made the same crossing.