She’s an American who survived her own “Argo”-style daring escape from the Middle East.
And last week, Nashwa el-Sayed, 22, added a New York coda to her thrilling tale that shows this tenacious, young woman is dedicated to more than just her own personal freedom.
We have a stateswoman in the making here.
“I was born on Dec. 26, 1990, in Columbia Presbyterian to a Puerto Rican-New Yorker mom and an Egyptian-born father named Mohamed el-Sayed,” she says. “My mom was 30. My dad was like 33.”
She had no siblings. Sayed learned to creep and toddle in a home on 106th St. in South Ozone Park, Queens.
“My mother tells me that when I was 2 1/2, she had a big fight with my father over his physical abusiveness,” she says. “First, he abused her. When he began to beat me, my mom said it caused me to stutter.”
Her mom took Mohamed Sayed to court. He moved out. The mom maintained custody of her daughter, but the dad was granted unsupervised visitation.
“One day in 1993, my father picked me up and didn’t bring me back to my mom,” she says. “My life changed forever that day.”
The NYPD and FBI search was futile. Sayed had absconded with his daughter to Alexandria, Egypt.
“I was learning English and didn’t know any Arabic,” she says. “I was placed with my father’s brother for two years. Then my father remarried and I moved back with him. But his new wife resented me.
“At 5, I became a maid,” she says. “Waiting on adults, cleaning and doing house chores. My stepmother also beat me and threatened that if I told my father she would kill me.”
Nashwa says she was a house servant until she was 9, when her stepmother gave birth to an autistic child.
“My job was to take care of my half-brother,” she says. “My father and his wife fought. She beat me. When I finally told my father that his wife was beating me, he beat me with a belt. I felt so alone, so alienated. I started asking about my real mother. He told me my mom had given me up as a baby and that she had died.”
Soon, her father divorced.
Nashwa lived alone with her father. “One day, out of the blue, he said, ‘Someone is coming to visit you.’ ”
Two weeks later, she answered the door. “I was about 10. Standing there was my mother,” she recalls. “I didn’t speak any English. She spoke no Arabic. But it was the happiest moment of my life. I embraced her. I wouldn’t let go.”
Her mother stayed for two weeks, explaining that she had finally learned of her daughter’s whereabouts from an Egyptian friend of Mohamed’s in Queens.
“It was heartbreaking when my mother returned to New York, but she promised to return,” says Nashwa. “My mom sent me tapes and videos: Backstreet Boys, Shakira, Madonna. I listened over and over. Memorizing lyrics. Asking my father what each English word meant.”
When her father got cable TV, she watched sitcoms like “Friends” and “The King of Queens,” learning English from Arabic subtitles. “My mom called every week, and she would correct my English until I could speak full sentences. My mother came back and stayed for the whole summer.”
Nashwa says her mother visited her only twice more after that summer, imploring her to find a way to come to America. “Unfortunately, I did not develop a deep relationship with my mother,” she says. “But what she told me about life in America made me want to go.”
Nashwa says she pestered her father to send her to New York to study. “He always said, ‘Next year. Next year.’ I was about 14 when America went to war with Iraq. It electrified the politics of the Middle East. I was an honor student in high school. When I was 16, I told my father I wanted a life in politics. He laughed and said, ‘Politics is not for girls. I found you a husband. He’s a businessman, so you will study business to help him at work.’ ”
Horrified by the prospect of an arranged marriage to an older stranger, she called her mother, who called the State Department.
“A few days later, in the summer of 2008, I was approached on the street by an FBI agent who gave me the name of a woman State Department agent I should secretly meet at the American Embassy.”
The next day, Nashwa told her father she was going to a friend’s party. Instead, she met with the State Department staffer and two FBI agents and told them everything about her abduction, life of servitude, beatings and a pending arranged marriage. “The State Department agent asked me, ‘Why should we help you?’ I said, ‘Because I am an American and I want a better life in America.’ ”
When she got home, her father was in a rage. He beat her. Her uncle’s wife had been in the embassy that morning wearing a burka and had seen Nashwa talking with the agents.
“I was taken to the uncle’s house,” she says. “All of my family was gathered, berating me, saying I was a bad Muslim. That in America, I would be drinking, partying with boys, living a life of sin. I looked at them and said, ‘If America is so bad, why are you all on a waiting list to go there?’ They had no answer.”
Nashwa called her mother, saying she would kill herself before marrying a stranger. When her mom told the FBI that her daughter had been seen at the embassy and was contemplating suicide, they again surreptitiously contacted Nashwa. “They said they had a seat on a flight leaving Cairo in the morning. ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance,’ the agent said.”
ashwa arranged to sleep at a friend’s house, grabbed her secret $600 in savings and texted the FBI agent the friend’s address. She didn’t sleep a wink. Then at 5 a.m. on Aug. 13, 2008, Nashwa tiptoed out of the friend’s apartment. She raced down the seven steps to the gate.
No van.
Panicked, she texted the FBI agents. The feds replied they were running late. Her phone buzzed with a text from her father. She started to run. Her father called. She ran faster. Almost a mile. Ran all the way to the highway — where the FBI agents skidded to a stop.
They pulled Nashwa into an unmarked van and raced for the airport. Handed her an American passport. Her father called. Her father texted. “I threw the cell phone out the window,” she says.
Suddenly, she was on a plane to Austria.
“I connected to a plane to France,” she says. “And then, like a dream come true, I was landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens, where I was kidnapped by my father 15 years earlier.”
The mother-daughter reunion was not the fairy-tale ending Nashwa had imagined.
Time, distance, clashing cultures and her mom’s boyfriend all created a chilly barrier.
“I stayed with my mother until I was 18,” she says. “Then I enrolled in Queens College, took student loans and got a job in a mall and waiting tables at Woodhaven House restaurant and found an apartment on Craigslist and studied hard.”
On Friday, Nashwa was awarded a bachelor’s degree in political science and international relations from Queens College. But she was not there to collect her diploma.
Last Tuesday, she left on a two-week mission to the Middle East with the prestigious Ibrahim Foundation Leadership and Dialogue Project to study the political, cultural and economic structures of Dubai, Israel, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
Nashwa is one of six students representing Christianity, Islam and Judaism — two from each faith — working to foster a common dialogue in the flaring Middle Eastern conflicts.
“My other goal in life besides international politics is to start a foundation to help families struggling with international abduction,” she says. “I want to use my own experience to help others going through similar nightmares. My father laughed at me when I told him I wanted a life in politics. I live back in my native America now, so I think I will have the last laugh.”
Hats off to the graduate.
