Mahsa Nami
Three by Eva, a Lebanese restaurant at the border between Jumeirah 2 and Al Wasl neighborhoods in Dubai, is where our friend group comes to meet Mahsa just thirty six hours after she got married. It all feels a bit surreal because we haven’t had this group together since we all finished graduate school seven years ago in Boston, and yet it somehow feels like time hadn’t passed and like nothing had changed.
Except that everything had changed since then, not least evidenced by the fact that Mahsa floored us all with a trifecta of wedding dresses the other night: a long green dress and a green veil, both embroidered with gold- and silver-color patterns, for the traditional Persian ceremony called sofreh aghd; a white long dress embroidered with golden leaf motifs and a bold golden waist belt for the Moroccan bride’s queenly arrival on an amaria; and the long white satin dress with a shimmery, translucent veil for the grand finale, when the wedding traditions fused into an entertainingly eclectic mix of Persians, Moroccans, Emiratis, Americans, and Canadians mingling at dinner, celebrating Mahsa, a Dubai-native Persian-Canadian, and her husband Momo, a New Jersey-native Moroccan. The two met in New York a few years ago, and knew they liked each other after the first date.
“You both seemed very chill and relaxed throughout all the ceremonies,” I tell Mahsa at the restaurant. “Don’t know how you did that.”
“I surprisingly was,” she laughs. “Momo is chill about most things, but that’s not the case for me. Sometimes he thinks I create too much drama.”
To her credit, she has every right to find this all dramatic. In less than eighteen hours, Mahsa has to be on a flight to Nairobi for her and Momo’s honeymoon in Kenya. Instead of telling me I was out of my mind to ask her for an interview on the one day between her wedding and her honeymoon trip, Mahsa agreed to spend five hours with me, and so the two of us say bye to our friends after lunch and we head toward the luxurious Bulgari Resort Dubai on the Jumeirah Bay island.
Mahsa was born and raised in Dubai but her family is Persian. In the late seventies, her father sensed that the Iranian revolution was brewing and that it was prudent to reevaluate his future. The unification of the Arab Emirates had just occurred a few years prior, in 1971 to be more specific, so he took the risk, left Iran, and moved to the newly-formed United Arab Emirates, a country that at the time looked nothing like the economic powerhouse it is today. He met Mahsa’s mother, who is also Persian but grew up in Kuwait, at a wedding during one of his post-revolution trips back to Iran. They got married and started a family in Dubai, and raised three children: Mahsa, Sharif, and Fatemeh.
The eldest of the three, Mahsa stayed in Dubai until college. She was a high-achieving student, liked architecture and science, and was very attuned to sustainability issues.
“How was the high school experience in Dubai?” I ask her.
“Conservative,” Mahsa laughs. “I went to the Dubai National School. Boys and girls were separate. Growing up in Dubai was definitely a unique experience, looking back on it.”
“As in?”
“I think the city definitely influenced my worldview early on,” she answers. “I mean, I do love Dubai. This is where I feel at home. But, it wasn’t really until I moved to North America that I became more tolerant of risk, less rigid, and more appreciative of other cultures. In that sense, the city was its own universe.”
Growing up in modern-age Dubai was a unique experience for one more reason. One that is, oddly enough, related to a country’s economic policy: the United Arab Emirates does not levy personal income taxes. So far, the country has been able to afford this perk for its residents because its dollar-value worth of exported crude oil per capita is higher than that of many other oil-exporting countries.
Here is a useful comparison. In 2022, the United States was the fourth highest exporter at $117.0 billion of exported crude oil, and the United Arab Emirates lagged slightly behind the United States, taking the fifth place at $112.7 billion of exported crude oil. But, once standardized for total population in 2022, the United States at 338.29 million people and the United Arab Emirates at 9.44 million people, we get a different picture. The United Arab Emirates comes out to $11,989 dollar-value worth of exported crude oil per capita while the United States comes out to just $346 dollar-value worth of exported crude oil per capita. Put differently, the United Arab Emirates extracted 35 times more monetary value from exported crude oil per capita than the United States.
The math behind this comparison manifests subtly but extensively in a city like Dubai. No personal income tax attracts many foreign individuals who come to the city with the aim of making a lot of untaxed money and leaving the city after a few years. Which gives Dubai a distinct flavor of transient opulence.
“There are a lot of transient cities out there in the world,” Mahsa says about this. “People come, they work for a few years, and then they leave. But, I think what’s specific about Dubai is that people move here for the money, not for culture or experiences. What I have seen, as a result, is that people become flashier and more concerned with their image after a few years of living in the city. What you wear, what you drive, how much the stuff in your house costs, those become symbols of status.”
After hanging out at the Bulgari Resort, Mahsa suggests that we take a Careem to Alserkal Avenue, a hub for the city’s contemporary art, and get something to drink, while we’re there, at Nightjar Coffee Roasters. This arts space and this coffee shop are some of her favorite spots in the city. When we get there, we order iced tea and talk about Mahsa’s post-Dubai life.
By the end of high school, Mahsa was itching to try out something new and she had her eyes set on universities in North America. University of Toronto became her home for the next five years, and she brought a part of Dubai to Canada with her: Mahsa’s mom and Mahsa’s two siblings, Sharif and Fatemeh. Life in Toronto supercharged Mahsa’s life. She majored in chemical engineering and was involved in various sustainability and energy activities outside the classroom. She ended up with Canadian citizenship as well.
“So, why did you leave Canada after university?” I ask.
“I liked engineering and I wanted to apply my knowledge,” she replies. “But, the path seemed too singular. Pretty much every engineer I knew was moving to Alberta for process engineering jobs, and I just couldn’t do that. I realized I want to broaden my technical skills. I cared about sustainability and I cared about energy and I was interested in using these to drive policy-making.”
That’s how Mahsa ended up at MIT, where she and I became classmates in the Technology and Policy Program. Her two-year research project in the program focused on fuels for light-duty vehicles in China. After graduating, she did a six-month internship in autonomous mobility at the World Economic Forum in New York. The choices were aligned with Mahsa’s desire to deepen her expertise in technically backed policies. But then, a plot twist happened. Mahsa left North America and moved back to Dubai for a full-time job. She accepted a position in management consulting at McKinsey.
“It wasn’t my intention to move to Dubai for a job,” she says about this. “During the interview process, the hiring team said that was the office they could give me, and I figured it would be a potential way to get exposure to energy sectors in the area. Plus, I knew that management consulting would provide me with soft skills I didn’t have at the time. The ability to pick up context, do problem synthesis, client management. I didn’t have any of that.”
She spent three years in the Dubai office before transferring to the New York one, where she spent the fourth and final year. The New York office was always a highly competitive hub for McKinsey consultants, but after a few months of working in New York, Mahsa started to see that the Dubai office had provided many unique opportunities a typical early-career consultant was not exposed to in the US.
“Because the processes and clients were far more established in the US, the nature of work in the New York office was more advisory. In Dubai, on the other hand, clients expected more. We were not just advising but were also helping with execution. Now that I’ve had first-hand experience with both environments, I definitely think the work in Dubai came with more challenges. But it also meant I learned more.”
The engineering background, the research in technology and policy, and the four years of advisory and operational experience began to complement each other. Mahsa realized that she was now equipped with both the engineering skillset to get into the weeds of technical problems and the business acumen to devise and advocate for strategic proposals. She wanted to bring it all together.
“After four years in consulting, it started to feel like I wasn’t taking any risks anymore,” she adds. “By this point, I think my interests started to crystallize. I wanted to work on sustainable and resilient infrastructures, and I wanted to be in a place where I could have a holistic understanding of the market and where I could support ways of using technology to disrupt infrastructure.”
Mahsa left McKinsey and joined Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), a holding company specifically focused on technology-enabled infrastructure. It was there that Mahsa found her sweet spot, a half-and-half split between investing and advising. From carbon removal to efficient 5G deployment and connectivity via small cells, the projects at SIP allowed Mahsa to support early-stage infrastructure businesses by advising on growth initiatives, budget plans, and product development timelines.
“Infrastructure is not direct-to-consumer or B2B SaaS,” she adds. “Infrastructure customers are not fast-moving businesses or consumers. The customers are public utilities and slow-growing companies, which can’t achieve the type of growth you might expect from a company that sells software. There was an implicit understanding from everyone in this type of work that infrastructure investments are slower and not astronomically lucrative. But, I found it inspiring that I could help establish a sustainable society, and what was so exciting about having this type of job was that I got to understand things holistically and be there for the entirety of the process, both advising and executing.”
Having had part of her career in North America and part of her career in the Middle East also made Mahsa highly attuned to the subtleties of working-place norms in these different cultures. It gave her a unique perspective on how the governing structures in these countries create unexpected ripple effects on people’s everyday jobs.
“In the West, where people’s interests can definitely shape national policies, people often don’t realize how much investment there is in topics like sustainable infrastructure,” Mahsa says. “There is a lot of opportunity for innovation, and having access to that is something you can’t easily get elsewhere.”
But there is a catch to this.
“The funnily unexpected upside of authoritarian states, on the other hand,” she continues, “is that things happen quickly when something needs to get done. Infrastructure projects in the Gulf, like the Dubai Metro as a recent example, don’t face as many administrative hurdles as those in more democratic countries, where there can be so much red tape. I have to say it’s definitely more energizing when you don’t have to deal with all that hassle.”
Mahsa and I leave Nightjar Coffee Roasters and check out a few nearby galleries. We enter one where I spot a black-and-white photo of a woman wearing a head covering, with text imprinted over it. It is a piece by Shirin Neshat, the Iranian visual artist and photographer renowned for her ability to capture contrasts between Islam and the West as well as between femininity and masculinity. The moment reminds me that there is an aspect of Mahsa’s identity we have not yet talked about, which undoubtedly had a profound impact on how Mahsa is perceived in the West. Mahsa is Muslim, and more specifically, she is a Muslim woman.
Five years ago, when I went to the Contemporary Muslim Fashions exhibition at de Young museum in San Francisco, I was transfixed by a music video that was played on a large screen in one of the main rooms. It was Mona Haydar’s debut single “Hijabi (Wrap My Hijab),” and the sight was one of those exquisite sociological moments that you get to witness only occasionally: a few well-dressed adults were watching the video with fascination and bobbing their heads, other adults were listening to the lyrics with slight apprehension, a few kids were dancing to the beat, and one young boy was laughing at the sight of Haydar—a Syrian-American hijabi rapper—spitting bars. It was art at its best, provocative and entertaining and poignant all at once.
I remember texting Mahsa—who turned out to have been a fan of Haydar already—after the exhibition and excitedly sharing my impressions, because at that moment I heard, or perhaps I finally allowed myself to hear, a work of art asking questions that Mahsa probably had to hear every day as a Muslim woman: ‘Yo, what yo hair look like? Don’t that make you sweat? Don’t that feel too tight?.’ And I heard implicit, philosophical questions being asked that Mahsa likely had to ask herself every day. What is it like to be a Muslim woman in America? What’s the meaning of the hijab? Is it pride? Is it a protest?
“I personally don’t see it as a symbol of protest and pride,” she tells me when I ask her this question. “Hijab, for me, is instead a visible reminder to myself of my own faith, and of my commitment to live according to the values of my faith.”
“It’s interesting that you say a reminder.”
“Because I have definitely questioned myself, especially around what Islam means to me,” she adds. “It’s not easy. Some people claim Islam as their religion but are not kind to others, not honest to others, not willing to help others. They use it as a vehicle for other agendas. Yet, if you read the Quran, the first sentence clearly states: ‘In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful.’ So, the hijab is a reminder to myself that my faith is a faith of compassion and mercy.”
There is great significance in this answer because it highlights Mahsa’s admirable ability to continuously test and revise her own truth, amid a flurry of external voices that can make it hard to do so. In this particular case, two currents of thought collide head on.
On one hand, Mahsa faces the modern society’s push to reclaim the hijab and embrace it as a tool of resistance against far-right, anti-Islamic movements in Western societies. On the other hand, within her own family, she sees the significance of hijab steadily diminish. Her sister Fatemeh, who spent her childhood and adolescence almost entirely in Canada, does not wear one. Their father, who—in a stereotypical father-daughter dynamic—might be expected to encourage its wearing, is actually the one who wants Mahsa to stop wearing a hijab.
It’s a vortex of contradictory realities and, at the center of it, Mahsa somehow exists unperturbed and maintains her own reality. A reality that stands on its own, that does not fit cleanly into any of the other realities, and that allows Mahsa to define what her religion and her headwear mean to Mahsa. Not to anyone else.
After this gallery, we walk over to a smaller one, a minimalist space adorned with the works of eL Seed, the Tunisian-French contemporary artist known for his calligraphic work at the intersection of street art, painting, and sculpture. There, like a pair of magnets, Mahsa and I glide toward eL Seed’s piece The Shine II, a work of colorful acrylic paint on canvas, placed behind bright orange metallic bars. It’s unsettlingly evocative of both a cartoonish playground and a refugee camp. One could say, evocative of the horrors of human displacement.
“Makes me wonder why I never think about this,” I remark. “Despite the fact I am fully aware of it.”
“It’s just not what we see or hear in the West,” Mahsa adds. “Even in art.”
“Do you ever feel out of place in that way? When you talk about your favorite art or favorite films or favorite music with people, do you feel like your taste is inherently different? Foreign to others, maybe?”
“Not everything, but when it comes to movies, then definitely,” she answers. “Just by the nature of marketing and non-English movies having a harder time reaching Western audiences. I would say when it comes to my favorite movies, four out of five are all Middle Eastern.”
For the record, those four movies are:
A Separation (2011), directed by Asghar Farhadi
Children of Heaven (1997), directed by Majid Majidi
West Beirut (1998), directed by Ziad Doueiri
Where Do We Go Now? (2011), directed by Nadine Labaki
In a typical Mahsa fashion, the fifth movie—or movie trilogy to be more specific—adds an entertaining plot twist.
5. The Before trilogy: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013), directed by Richard Linklater
“Get out, I never pegged you as a Linklater girl.”
“Oh, I love them,” she laughs. “I think they are very similar to the other movies on the list. I like films that deal with themes of life, the things we all experience and feel. I was never really into genres that can’t do this, like action or superhero movies. Those are not my vibe.”
At four in the afternoon, we leave the smaller gallery and make our way toward the Alserkal Avenue entrance. We pick up our pace because it has started to rain and because Mahsa needs to go pack for her honeymoon. Just as we walk by a big rectangular building with a concrete gray exterior, Mahsa stops abruptly and points at the lettering on the street, painted inside a green block, right under our feet.
“forget your ego, remember your soul. @PersianPoet”