The word mentor arrives with a very specific image.

Teacher and student. Expert and apprentice.

The knowledge moves in one direction — from the one who has it to the one who doesn't yet. It is a reassuring image. It implies order. It implies that wisdom has a clear address and can be reliably delivered.

The problem is that it bears almost no resemblance to how creative knowledge actually travels. The sensibility, the instinct These do not transfer through programs or pairings or quarterly check-ins.

They have to be absorbed. Often sideways. Often from sources the recipient didn't recognise as teachers at the time.

In this episode of the Forward_Moves Recap Series, four guests describe their most formative transmissions — none of which looked anything like the conventional image. One learned from a house. One from a rejection. One from a single conversation with a stranger in New York. One from a father who gave her everything except formal instruction. And what connects all four stories is this: the most important thing they received was not knowledge in the form of information. It was permission.

Voices in This Episode

Naz Gibril — British-Libyan fashion and luxury strategist

Mishari Al-Nassar — Kuwaiti interior architect and designer

Asmaa Shabibi — Co-founder of Lawrie Shabibi gallery in Dubai

Natalya Urmanova — Dubai-based photographer

Chapters

03:49 Naz Gibril on where mentorship actually matters most

06:38 Mishari Al-Nassar on his grandfather's legacy

09:59 Asmaa Shabibi on the New York collector who changed everything

13:39 Natalya Urmanova on her subjects and her role

17:30 Raja's eight-episode recap: eight threads across thirty-eight conversations

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Download. Share. Subscribe.

There is a distinction at the heart of this episode that is easy to miss. The difference between making something here and making it from here.

Making something here is a logistical fact: the geography is incidental, the work could have come from anywhere. Making it from here is entirely something else.

It means the work carries the region inside it: the specific freedom of a city with no inherited idea of what you're supposed to be, the specific weight of building in a place that is simultaneously ancient and still becoming.

This episode does not celebrate the outcomes, the awards, the exhibitions, the international recognition. It sits with the specific conditions that shaped the work. The cost of insisting on where you come from when the market rewards you more generously for smoothing it out. The permission that didn't exist until someone built anyway. The honest negotiation between the full version of who you are and the version that travels more easily.

Five guests, five disciplines, one thread: the region is not a backdrop to the work. It is inside the work.

El Seed — Paris-born Tunisian artist

Sumayya Dabbagh — Saudi architect

Badr Najeeb — Emirati pastry chef and chocolatier

Mariam Yehia — Egyptian-French fashion designer and founder of Mrs Keepa,

Amad Mian — Co-founder of Dastaangoi, a Dubai-based luxury fragrance house

Chapters

00:00 Intro

03:43 ElSeed on Arabic calligraphy as a bridge

05:47 Sumatra Dabbagh on her return

07:52 Badr Najeeb on the societal challenge

10:11 Mariam Yehia on being an Egyptian fashion designer

12:58 Amad Mian on the shift

13:58 Closing remarks

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Download. Share. Subscribe.

The algorithm rewards the new, the rapid, the instantly shareable.

Brands need to go viral. Artists need to build audiences in months. Restaurants need to trend or they're written off. The entire vocabulary of ambition is built around the idea that if it's not happening fast, it's not happening at all.

And yet, across three seasons of Forward_Moves, the people who built the things that genuinely matter described almost none of it quickly.

Almost all of them went through the same journey: doing the work without being sure it was actually working. The durability of what they built is directly related to the time they spent inside it.

This episode is about that time. About what depth actually produces that speed cannot. About mastery as a daily decision, not a destination. And about the part of creative practice that never appears in any portfolio — the silent processing that happens not while you are working on the project, but in the hours around it.

Voices in This Episode

Mohamed Maktabi — CEO of Iwan Maktabi,

Hani AlMalki — Dubai-based food writer and curator known as Bedouin Foodie.

Anthony Maalouf — Lebanese architect.

Nada Debs — Designer and founder of Studio Nada Debs

Omar Al-Gurk — Emirati designer, architect, and photographer, founder of Modu Method.

Zain Massoud — Landscape designer

Chapters

00:00 Intro

02:30 Mohamed Maktabi on his Sufi mentor's lesson

05:09 Hani AlMalki on keeping it real

06:20 Hani on the shortcuts

07:51 Anthony Maalouf on the word ostentatious.

09:29 Nada Debs on intuition

10:52 Omar Al-Gurk on pottery as self-knowledge

12:25 Omar Al-Gurk on boredom as creative methodology

14:48 Zain Massoud

15:10 Closing comments

"It's a career that you can continue indefinitely. You only get better."

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Download. Share. Subscribe.