Nujeen : One Girl's Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair by Nujeen Mustafa with Christina Lamb (Harper)

“I don’t collect stamps or coins or football cars - I collect facts. Most of all I like facts about physics and space, particularly string theory. Also about history and dynasties like the Romanovs. And controversial people like Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover”. 

Nujeen Mustafa says she hates the word refugee more than any other word in the English language. She says what it really means is “a second-class citizen with a number scrawled on your hand or printed on a wristband, who everyone wishes would somehow go away.”  In the year 2015, Nujeen “became a fact, a statistic, a number.” As much as she likes facts she goes on to say that “we are human beings.” 

Nujeen is the story of one girl’s incredible journey from war-torn Syria in a wheelchair. It is written by Nujeen with Christina Lamb who was the coauthor of I Am Malala. Nujeen says her name means “new life”. Her parents already had four girls and four boys so her birth was rather unexpected. The age difference between her and her eldest brother is twenty-six years. 

The family first lived in a town called Manbij in northern Syria, close to the border with Turkey. She calls her mother Ayee and her father Yaba. They are not Arabic words. Nujeen is a Kurd. 

As one of the few Kurdish families living in a town that was mostly Arab who she says “looked down on us and called our area the Hill of the Foreigners”. The family was forced to speak Arabic. They could only use their own language Kurmanji in their home. It was most difficult for her parents who were illiterate and didn’t speak Arabic. 

Nujeen was born with cerebral palsy. Her family moved to Aleppo so she could get better healthcare than she did in Manbij. Life was a little better. She even taught herself to speak a little English by watching the American soap opera Days of Our Lives.

During the Syrian Civil War, a civil war which started after the Arab Spring Protests - a series of anti-government protests against corruption and economic stagnation. However, unlike other Arab nations that managed to depose their corrupt government officials, the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad used violent force to suppress the demonstrators. 

This led to the Syrian Refugee Crisis where millions of Syrians left their country or have been displaced within their own nation. Nujeen is one of the millions of asylum seekers. She is an extraordinary young woman who escaped from Syria in a wheelchair. This is her story. 

Nujeen is a Kurdish Syrian refugee who traveled from the historic city of Aleppo to escape war and civil unrest to Germany where her brother lives. She made the perilous journey in a wheelchair with her sister who pushed her most of the way. Since leaving Aleppo, the girls “had travelled more than 3,500 miles across nine countries from war to peace - a journey to a new life, just like her name. It had taken them a month since leaving Gaziantep in Turkey where her parents remained. 

The trip had cost them nearly 5,000 Euros for Nujeen and her sister, mostly paid for by her elder brothers who were already living abroad. They traveled from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos in a dinghy. Then onto Athens on mainland Greece and continuing to Macedonia and Serbia and were hoping to go through Hungary as well. However, their luck seemed to have run out as Hungary closed its borders to all refugees. They had to change their plans and their journey took them through Croatia, Slovenia and Austria before they finally reached Germany. 

Najeen and other refugees not only had to leave the comforts of their home, they had to deal with smugglers, bribe corrupt officials, were persecuted by right-wing fanatics and yet Najeen retained her sense of dignity. Nujeen is an inspiration and a role-model to show the world that refugees are not all criminals and contribute to society if that society lets them. 

The Syrian refugee crisis still continues and Bashar al-Assad is still President of Syria. Now that the news is focusing on Russian aggression against Ukraine, people are seeming to forget the crimes committed by al-Assad and his regime. Why he is still in power is a mystery to me. Why can’t the international community depose people like al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and all the other tyrants around the world. Until we rid the world of these people, the world will never be a safe place. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Book of Saladin by Tariq Ali (Verso)

The Book of Saladin is the second book in Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet. Although it is the second book in the series, each book can be read as a stand alone novel. The story is based on the real life historical figure of Al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. Salal al-Din or Saladin as he is known to Westerners was a Sunni Muslim Kurd who became the first Sultan of Egpyt and Syria and served under the sovereignty of the Caliph of Baghdad. He was also the Muslim leader who led a campaign against the Franj (the Franks or Holy Crusaders) and retook the city of al-Kuds (al-Quds) which is the Arabic name for Jerusalem. 

Many of the other male characters are also based on actual historical figures such as Saladin’s father, brothers, uncles, and nephews. Ibn Maymun is the great Jewish philosopher who is also known as Maimonedes. The women are Ali’s creation as there are no records of the women from the Sultan’s era. 

In Ali’s novel, the story is narrated in three parts by Isaac ibn Yacob. It starts off in the city of Cairo, Egypt, then continues in Damascus in present day Syria and the conclusion of the story leads to al-Kuds or Jerusalem in the Levant which includes present day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and most of Turkey east of the Euphrates. 

Ibn Maymun came to visit Ibn Yacob on a cold night in 1181 according to the Christian calendar. On the same evening, Yacob receives another visitor which he surmised was for his friend. The visitor was unknown to Yacob until Ibn Maymun addressed him as “Commander of the Brave”. Ibn Yacob realizes he is in the presence of the Sultan.

The Sultan has come to Ibn Maymun to ask for advice on finding a scribe to whom he could dictate his memoirs. It is Ibn Maymun who recommends Ibn Yacob but suggests but tells the Sultan, “Your request poses a problem. You are never in one city for too long. Either the scribe must travel with you, or we will have to find another one in Damascus.”

The Sultan surprises both Ibn Maymun and Ibn Yacob. He says, “And a third city beckons. I hope to be visiting al-Kuds soon.” al-Kuds or Jerusalem is still under the power of the Crusaders. It was an occupied city. Ibn recognizes that the Sultan has just announced his intention to take al-Kuds back from the non-Believers. The following day, the Sultan begins to dictate his memoirs.

Ibn Yacob has no choice but to follow the Sultan to Damascus and then to Jerusalem to continue to write about the Sultan’s life, his thoughts and his exploits. As the scribe to the sultan, he spends more time in the palace than he does at home which causes a rift in his marriage. To complicate matters further, he made a surprise visit home, only to find his good friend Ibn Mayum on top of his wife!

Ali’s attention to historical detail makes this fictitious biography and memoir not only entertaining but educational as well. The story still hold true today as the forces of Islam and Christianity continue to clash. Even now, in the 21st century, the future of Palestine and the Middle East is still in turmoil with no resolution in sight. It makes you wonder if religion is actually, “the root of all evil”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories that Carried Them Through a War by Delphine Minou (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Every day another headline cascades through social media. Another photo fills a screen and with one click, a new one takes its place. With so many disasters flaring across the world, Attention Deficit Disorder outranks Covid-19 as the leading malady of our time. “The world is too much with us;” turning away seems to be the only possible response.

When Delphine Minoui, an Istanbul-based journalist for Le Figaro, finds an image of Syria “without a trace of blood or bullets” while she’s browsing a Facebook page called Humans of Syria, she can’t turn away. The photo of two young men in a room full of books, one of them reading, the other examining a bookshelf, is captioned “The secret library of Daraya.” 

Minoui knows about Daraya. It’s a city that once had a population of 250,000 and now holds less than half that number, 12,000 rebels against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Since 2012, Darya has been under siege, a place less than 1000 miles away from Istanbul but completely out of reach. A seasoned journalist, Minoui wants the story and she has the skills to uncover it. Through social media, she makes contact with the man who took the photograph, a co-founder of the library.

An active protestor since 2011, Ahmad Muaddamani and his compatriots see themselves as a third force: not jihadists, nor soldiers in the Free Syrian Army. Daraya is an unyielding center of active and peaceful dissent and by chance these dissenters find their primary means of defense.

One of them had walked into a destroyed house and found its floor was covered with books. At first his comrades thought he was mad for wanting to save these volumes, but they came to realize the books were a means of escape from the horror they live with. They understood Daraya needed these books; it needed a library.

They clean and paint a basement in a deserted building. They construct bookshelves. They scour the city for abandoned books in empty houses. Before these are put on the shelves, each one is numbered and inscribed with its owner’s name. “We’re not thieves,” Ahmad says, “Our revolution was meant to build, not destroy.”

The library they build is open six days a week from 9-5, It serves a daily average of 25 readers, who come in spite of a continuing deluge of barrel bombs filled with explosives and scrap metal, as many as 600 in a single month. They borrow The Alchemist, The Little Prince, Les Miserables, printed in languages that are not their own. When the library begins to offer classes in English, the readers come to learn. When it brings the outside world within its walls through videoconferences on Skype, discussion groups are born. The librarians publish a bi-monthly magazine, printed on a rescued photocopier; it holds tips on how to manage daily living during the siege, poems, news garnered from the internet, crossword puzzles with clues that hold grim humor. Ahmad finds a pdf of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He shrinks the text to fit four pages on a single sheet of paper and prints two copies. It becomes so popular readers fight to read it. It’s a mental survival guide in a city that’s been assaulted with chemical warfare while the world looked away, where a small UN convoy finally brings flour to people who have had no bread in years. The supply lasts less than a month and future convoys are barred from bringing more. Assad’s forces firebomb the fields that fed the city and Darya eats only vegetables grown in people’s yards and bulgur wheat that’s the last of the municipal reserves.

Then after 1350 days of siege, Assad drops four barrels of napalm on Daraya’s hospital. The city begins to die. Negotiations with the government ensure that its inhabitants will be safely transported to another city. 

Once it’s empty, Assad walks through Daraya’s ruins, “the deserted streets of a ghost city,” claiming to have restored “true freedom.” His soldiers strip the library and sell its books in the flea markets of Damascus. “Four years of saving Daraya’s heritage, swapped for a few coins.”

“So it’s over?” When Minoui asks Ahmad this question, he replies, “Of course not! You can destroy a city. Not ideas!” He and the other residents of Daraya hold tight to the words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, “We nurse hope.” The rest of us need to stop turning away from hope as we click through to the next post on Facebook.~Janet Brown