Fadwa Al Qasem
Fulfilment Beyond Profit: UAE Arabic Language Law and Lessons Learned
We all grew up accustomed to the precept that the raison d’etre of any business enterprise is to grow, expand, make ever more profit, and nothing else. But, what if enterprises couple these purely business goals with pursuits of, or advocacy for higher causes that can be even more rewarding on many levels than mere profit?
This is not about committing to CSR activities, ESG goals or other such universal concepts. It’s more than that. The recent announcement by the UAE Ministry of Culture of a dedicated legislation being drafted to protect and promote the use of the Arabic language across the country is a case in point.
When we founded Tabeer twenty years ago as the first agency in the UAE dedicated to creating and developing multilingual content, our primary motivation was to restore confidence in the Arabic language; to help it claim its rightful place among the world's great languages by producing high-caliber content that articulates complex ideas with precision and elegance, without sacrificing the spirit or the authenticity of the culture.
That mission was our northern start in every conversation with clients and media, across conference platforms and in our published work. If anything, that mission feels more vital than ever now, as organizations race to adopt generative AI for content production and translation. Uncritical reliance on these tools has already led to costly missteps that put major brands' reputations at risk.
The announcement of the forthcoming UAE legislation to protect and promote the Arabic language, along with the associated campaign to preserve the national culture and identity, was a great relief for us. Simply put, what the UAE is preparing to legislate we've been calling for and practicing for 20 years. Whether our two decades of work played any part in this conversation or not, we receive it as the greatest validation of a path we chose when almost no one else was walking it.
Over the years, we have learned that patience can also be a strategy. Another lesson we’ve learned that has also proved valuable, if not critical, was choosing for your business a place you understand from the inside, where you feel at home, where strong culture and heritage blend with modernity and the pursuit of progress and innovation. We chose the UAE, and specifically Dubai – or did Dubai choose us?
These two lessons stand out among twenty valuable takeaways we had over the past 20 years. We share them here with you, hoping you find them as useful to your organization as we do to ours.
20 Years, 20 Things Learned
Tabeer; Words Connecting Cultures
2006–2026
Our founding project was a permanent exhibition at the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai; a mall named after the great Arab explorer who spent decades crossing the known world. We spent months living inside his travels, his insatiable curiosity. And somewhere in that immersion, everything we had believed when we started became certain. Cultural depth was going to be more than a feature of our work. It was going to be the foundation of it. Every project since has been built on that.
The lesson: Don’t be afraid to take that big project that will confirm your instincts.
In 2006, we knew exactly what content development was, and we knew the Arab world needed it. But the market hadn't caught up to the idea of trusting a dedicated team of professional writers. Organizations were still turning to PR agencies for copywriting, to advertising houses for brand language, to whoever was available for everything else. We arrived with a different proposition: writers, first and foremost, with cultural intelligence built in. We started before the market had a name for what we did. When the market arrived, we were ready.
The lesson: Patience is also a strategy.
In 2006, Arab audiences were being spoken at, not spoken to. Global brands were arriving in the region with content developed elsewhere, translated at the last stage, distributed without adjustment. The gap between a brand's promise and its Arabic presence was real and audiences felt it. But the brands often didn't know why their messages weren't landing. We learned that our job was not only to close that gap, but to make it visible first.
The lesson: Sometimes the most important work you do is helping people understand what the problem is.
Dubai was the right place to start. In those early years, Dubai was where the world was arriving. Multinationals setting up regional headquarters, global brands entering the Arab market for the first time, organizations from every continent trying to understand a region they were only beginning to know. We were there for all of it as people who lived it, breathed it, and called it home. That belonging gave us something proximity alone never could: the ability to see both sides of every cultural conversation at once.
The lesson: Where you choose to build matters. Choose a place you understand from the inside.
Every business advisor we encountered had the same advice: define your niche, stay in your lane, say no to what doesn't fit. We had a different answer. We said yes to public policy research, scientific content, media training, exhibition copy, books praising the art of slow living. Because we built a model that could handle anything without compromising on quality. For every specialized topic, we found the right expert; someone who understood the subject as deeply as they understood the language.
The lesson: Your niche doesn't have to be a subject. It can be a standard.
We have worked through the financial crash, the Arab Spring, a pandemic, and conflicts that landed very close to home. Personally close. Every time, the question was the same: do you go quiet, or do you keep showing up? We learned that silence is also a message. And that showing up, carefully, honestly, without pretending everything was fine, took more thought, more skill, and more courage than anything we did in the quieter years.
The Lesson: Showing up during difficult times is the most important thing you will do.
The people who built Tabeer are authors, columnists, poets, editors, and subject matter experts first. They gave client projects everything they lived; years of reading across languages and disciplines, and living within many cultures. Some of the finest Arabic writing talent we encountered came from people in exile, in diaspora, far from where they started. Displacement does something to language. It makes you hold it more carefully. We found our best people in unexpected places. We learned to look there deliberately.
The lesson: When your niche is a standard rather than a subject, the talent that meets it might come from places far away.
Staying small was a choice. We have been asked many times why we haven't scaled. Why we don't have offices everywhere. The answer is that quality was always the product, and quality doesn't scale the way headcount does. We are boutique by design. Every project receives senior attention. Every client works with the people who built this. Staying small is not a limitation. It is a position.
The lesson: Depth and breadth pull in opposite directions. Choose one and own it.
For years, we made the case for Arabic in English. To clients, to decision-makers, to boards. The people who most needed to understand the value of Arabic content were often the ones who didn't read it. So we became translators of a different kind. Not of words, but of the argument itself. There is an irony in this that we came to appreciate: the language that needed advocacy could not do its own advocating in those rooms. English had to carry the argument first. Once it landed, Arabic could do the rest.
The lesson: Advocacy for a language or any other cause doesn’t necessarily have to be undertaken in the same language. Sometimes the most effective path runs through the very thing you are trying to complement.
Arabic is the native language of approximately 400 million people across 22 countries, with Modern Standard Arabic understood by educated speakers across the entire Arab world and beyond. That is an extraordinary reach. And within it, words differ. A term that sounds natural in Riyadh can feel slightly off in Rabat. A phrase that works in Abu Dhabi can land stiffly in Amman. Different countries, different organizations, different audiences; each with their own preferences and their own relationship with the language. Which is why we learned early to build a glossary from scratch with every client. A living document, not a generic list.
The lesson: Invest time in building foundational tools early. They may end up carrying your work further than you ever expected.
When AI content tools arrived, we asked an honest question: does this change what we do? We tested it, explored it, integrated it where it made sense. What we found was that while AI could produce content that was technically accurate, the register, the dialect, the rhythm were all slightly off in ways native speakers feel but cannot always name. That gap told us more about what we actually do than twenty years of creative tasks. AI tools can support our work, but they made the case for human cultural intelligence better than we ever could.
The Lesson: Adapt, hone, augment, but never lower your standards. No tool changes what good work requires.
Twenty years of creative tasks taught us one thing about creative blocks: there is no such thing as a problem without a solution. There is only a problem that hasn't found its language yet. A campaign that wouldn't move until someone reached for a word from another culture. A report that came alive when we changed the structure entirely. A message that had been stuck for months, unlocked by a metaphor from an unexpected place. We stopped treating creativity as a luxury that arrived after the real work was done. It was always the real work.
The Lesson: Creativity is not decoration. It is problem-solving with better tools. When logic runs out, trust the unexpected answer.
There have been times, and this is one of them, when the work felt very small against what was happening around us. We have learned that it isn't. We are part of this region. All of it. The Gulf that built us, the Levant that shaped our language, the wider Arab world whose stories we have spent twenty years trying to tell with care. Its losses are our losses. Its language is our language. Some of what has happened in recent years has no adequate words, and we work with words for a living. That inadequacy is something we carry into the work every day. It makes us more careful. More certain that language, used honestly, is never a small thing.
The Lesson: Language used honestly is never a small thing. Especially when it is the only thing left.
Every project starts with a brief. And the brief is always incomplete. Mainly because clients don't always know what they don't know yet. We learned early to listen between the lines. To hear what wasn't being said as clearly as what was. The best work we have done came from the conversations that happened after the brief was put away. The moment someone said "actually, what we are really trying to do is..." That is when things got interesting. We learned to listen for that moment. We also learned to create it.
The Lesson: The brief is never the whole story.
We designed our workspace like a home salon. Comfortable sofas, books everywhere, the kind of room where a conversation could go somewhere unexpected. Our office looks nothing like an office. That was intentional. We did it because we believed that the best ideas don't come from briefing rooms. They come from the moment someone feels comfortable enough to say the thing they weren't sure they were allowed to say. Our clients noticed. Some of them started having different conversations than the ones they came in for. That was always the point.
The Lesson: People say the important thing when they feel at ease. Everything you design, your space, your manner, your questions, should work toward that moment.
We have watched international clients interpret إن شاء الله as a polite refusal. It isn't. It is a statement about the limits of human certainty in the face of something larger. Really understanding that, not just knowing it intellectually, changes how you run a meeting, write a deadline, and build a relationship. Twenty years of working across cultures has taught us that time is not universal. How a culture relates to it tells you almost everything else about how it communicates, what it values, and what it expects from the people it works with.
The lesson: Before you interpret something as something else, check it against the culture it came from. The gap is the information.
Our most demanding clients made us better. The ones who came to every session with questions, who thought deeply about every word, who were as invested in the outcome as we were. We didn't always enjoy the resistance in the moment. We were always grateful for it afterward. The best creative relationships have friction in them. Not conflict, but the productive discomfort of someone who cares enough to push. A client who accepts everything is not an easy client. They are a missed opportunity.
The lesson: Resistance is a gift. The client who pushes back teaches you more than the one who agrees.
It took us longer than it should have to find the right words for what we do. We described ourselves in the language of the industry rather than the language of our own conviction. We softened the proposition, fitted ourselves into boxes that weren't quite right. Eventually we understood that positioning is not separate from the work. It is the first piece of writing you ever do about yourself. The way you name what you do shapes what people believe you are capable of. We choose those words more carefully now.
The lesson: The language you use about your own work matters as much as the work itself.
Trust in this region is not given. It is accumulated slowly, through consistency, through showing up when it would have been easier not to, through saying the difficult thing when silence would have been more comfortable. We have worked with some clients for fifteen years. That length of relationship is not loyalty. It is the result of trust built carefully over time, tested occasionally, and never taken for granted. We learned that the fastest way to lose it is to treat it as something already secured. Trust is always present tense.
The lesson: Trust is earned slowly and lost quickly. Treat it as something you are always still building.
Twenty years in, we know more than we did. We are also more aware of how much we don't know. That gap, far from being uncomfortable, is where the most interesting work lives. We used to want certainty. A clear map, a proven method, a formula that worked every time. What we found instead was that the organizations and people who stay curious outlast the ones who stop asking questions. Certainty is the end of curiosity. After twenty years, we are more curious than ever. The road keeps getting more interesting. We are still on it.
The lesson: Stay curious. The moment you think you have figured it out is the moment you stop growing.