What my journey from survival to giving taught me about generosity in the Gulf — and what Western nonprofits often miss
Where It Started
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world slowed in ways few of us were prepared for, I found myself with something I had rarely allowed: stillness.
What began as a personal pause quickly became something else. It became a return—to faith, to values I had carried quietly for years, and to a deeper understanding of what it means to give.
That understanding would eventually take shape more clearly when I relocated to the UAE, where generosity is not always visible, but deeply embedded. It moves through daily life without announcement, often without recognition, and rarely with the expectation of acknowledgment.
This article is not simply about my journey. It is about a broader realization: that in many parts of the world—particularly across the Gulf—philanthropy operates on principles that differ significantly from the models many Western nonprofits are built around.
To understand why that matters, it helps to begin where my own story did—not with giving, but with survival.
The Arc Behind the Lens
To understand why this resonated so deeply, it helps to know something about where I came from and the particular path that brought me here.
I was born in Iran. At five years old, my mother and I fled, crossing the mountains into Turkey on foot. I do not say that for dramatic effect. It is simply what happened — and it is one of the earliest things I remember about the distance between a life that is stable and one that is not.
We spent two years in Turkey as refugees. When UNHCR rejected our case and we faced deportation back to Iran, a piece of cardboard became our bed and shelter as we camped outside the UNHCR office. It was not a large institution that ultimately stood with us in that moment. It was individuals — people from small civil society organizations in Europe who knew our situation, stayed close to it, and refused to let the paperwork become the whole story. The organizations that were meant to protect us were, in those moments, very far away. The people who actually helped us were not.
I was five, the age when most children begin school, but because of my status, access to education did not come easily. For a period, I was denied schooling altogether. When we were eventually resettled in Canada as government-assisted refugees, I entered a classroom at age eight, placed into Grade 3, illiterate and without English, learning to read and write for the first time alongside peers who had never had to think about whether school would be available to them.
What followed was not a straight line. But it was a line. The system was not always ready for me. But people sometimes were. Neighbors, community members, ordinary citizens who owed us nothing and gave generously anyway — their presence was as formative as any formal service we received. Some educators were genuinely supportive; others were simply not equipped to understand the needs of a child carrying displacement, interrupted schooling, and trauma alongside a language barrier. Settlement services and nonprofit organizations filled gaps that formal schooling sometimes left open. I would only fully appreciate the weight of that support much later. But that child who could not read eventually completed a master’s degree and went on to teach, consult, and work across sectors. I do not say this for effect. I say it because it is evidence, personal and undeniable, that education and nonprofit services are not peripheral to human potential. They are load-bearing. And they work best not as substitutes for state-provided opportunity, but alongside it. The combination is what creates conditions for genuine transformation, not just the management of difficult circumstances.
What I carried from that early experience, beyond the language gaps and the academic catch-up, was something harder to name. A deep awareness of how it feels to be only partially seen. Kurdish at home. Iranian by nationality. Slowly becoming Canadian in the classroom. In each space, belonging felt conditional.
But something else emerged from that period too: an instinct toward helping. From a young age, I found myself translating for newcomer families, accompanying people to appointments, volunteering wherever I could. At the time, I did not think of this as philanthropy. It simply felt natural, perhaps because I understood, in a very personal way, how isolating systems can feel when you are trying to find your footing within them. I wasn’t administering charity from a distance. I was accompanying people. That distinction, I would later understand, matters enormously.
Looking back, those small acts of assistance were my earliest lessons in what proximity in giving actually looks like.
What I did not fully recognize at the time was that service was also healing me. The act of showing up for others gave shape and purpose to experiences that might otherwise have remained only painful. Giving, I was learning, was not a one-directional transfer. It was a practice that returned something to the giver — not recognition, but rootedness. A sense of being useful in the world in a way that transcended what the world had done to you.
From Lived Experience to Systems Lens
Those early experiences eventually pulled me toward study. I pursued my master’s degree researching refugee children’s access to education in Turkey, an attempt to understand systematically what I had lived personally. One of the most important lessons from that work was the danger of generalization. Refugee experiences are often discussed as if they are homogenous, but the data, and the lived realities behind it, tell a different story. Access barriers vary widely depending on geography, timing, identity, and the particular policies that happened to govern your life at that moment. Even within the same country, outcomes can differ significantly.
From there, my path moved across education, migration, nonprofit, community, and private sector environments, each adding a new layer of pattern recognition. What became increasingly clear was that social challenges are deeply interconnected, and that the most consequential gaps tend to live not within any single sector but between them. It was at that intersection, between lived experience, academic research, and cross-sector exposure, that my personal history began to crystallize into something closer to a systems lens.
The most consequential gaps tend to live not within any single sector but between them.
That lens carried a particular conviction: that sustainable change requires addressing root causes, not just symptoms. Nonprofits do essential work. But when they operate as permanent substitutes for structural opportunity rather than bridges toward it, there is a risk that something important is lost. Real transformation tends to happen when civil society and the state work in concert, when services and access reinforce one another, and when neither is asked to carry alone what both were meant to share.
What faith added, when I returned to it more consciously in the years that followed, was something my studies had quietly been pointing toward but could not fully resolve on their own. During my research I had begun to notice a tension at the heart of the nonprofit sector — how organizations built around human need can, over time, become distant from the very communities they were meant to serve. Systems analysis could name that tension. Faith made it impossible to look away. It reframed the question from how do systems work to what do we owe one another within them. Compassion, in this sense, is not a feeling. It is where you choose to stand.
What the Gulf Understands About Giving
When I arrived in the Gulf, I began to observe giving culture more closely, not only at the institutional level often captured in reports, but in the quiet rhythms of everyday life.
It showed up in small but consistent ways: coolers of water left outside homes for delivery workers during summer months; food packages distributed during Ramadan with no announcement attached; spontaneous acts of assistance offered without expectation of recognition. These were not performative gestures. They were expressions of something embedded, a moral and spiritual orientation toward generosity that did not require an audience.
At the same time, the region is experiencing a clear professionalization of philanthropy. Alongside individual giving, there has been significant growth in family foundations, structured endowments, and waqf — Islamic perpetual trusts rooted in religious law — as a vehicle for long-term charitable impact. Younger donors are increasingly interested in impact measurement and causes aligned with both Islamic values and global challenges such as climate and education. This reflects a broader maturation of the sector, with donors increasingly focused on domestic and regional impact aligned with shared cultural and social priorities.
Yet even as structures formalize, certain underlying values remain distinct and are often misunderstood by organizations approaching Gulf donors from outside the region.
Some Western fundraising approaches that often emphasize visibility and recognition can find Gulf philanthropy difficult to navigate. In many Muslim contexts, anonymity in giving is not incidental — it is virtuous. The intention behind the act carries spiritual weight, and some of the region’s most significant donors remain intentionally low-profile in ways that sit outside familiar donor recognition models.
Relational pacing is another area of difference. Some nonprofit fundraising cycles follow a rapid sequence: pitch, close, report. In many Gulf and Muslim philanthropic contexts, trust-building tends to be more gradual and relationship-centered. Donors giving zakat, the obligatory charitable contribution required of Muslims, may prioritize religious eligibility criteria as much as, or more than, conventional efficiency metrics. Organizations that cannot speak to those criteria are, in an important sense, not yet speaking the right language.
There is also a deeper theological distinction that shapes everything else. Islamic philanthropy is not primarily about donor visibility or impact attribution. It is rooted in fulfilling a duty to God and in the spiritual concept of purifying one’s wealth through giving. In this framework, the donor is not the hero of the story. This produces a different relationship to public acknowledgment and what success is even meant to look like. Often, who benefits and whether they are treated with dignity in the process carries as much moral weight as any measure of outcomes or efficiency.
In many Muslim contexts, anonymity in giving is not incidental — it is virtuous.
And just as refugee communities cannot be treated as a single uniform group, Muslim donors cannot be approached as a monolith. Motivations, giving vehicles, timelines, and expectations vary widely across individuals, families, and contexts. When organizations apply overly generalized assumptions, they risk misunderstanding both the depth and the diversity of what they are engaging with.
The Arc, Looking Back
Survival. Direct helping. Studying systems. Cross-sector exposure. Faith as reframing. And finally, philanthropic insight — not as a destination, but as an ongoing practice of staying close to both the architecture of systems and the human realities within them.
That arc was not planned. But looking back, each stage was necessary preparation for the next.
I think of the water coolers left outside homes on hot afternoons. No name attached. No photograph taken. No report filed.
The most transformative forms of generosity are not always the most visible. They are the ones that quietly expand dignity, access, and possibility — often long before anyone thinks to measure them.
