Around dinner tables across the Middle East, some of the region’s biggest business decisions were taking shape long before they appeared in company records.
Brothers became business partners, majlis became meeting rooms, and family ties carried companies across borders and through generations of change.
These are the stories that fascinate Israa Mahgoub, a research associate at NYU Abu Dhabi. Through the Family Business Histories project, she traces the people behind family-owned companies across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, and uncovers the forces that shaped them.
“You start with the eldest generation and work your way to the youngest,” she says. “You hear how they grew up, how they entered the business, and what happened along the way. Then you go back through the history and piece together how that business became what it is.”
A fascination with people
Born and raised in Abu Dhabi, Mahgoub initially studied urban planning before realizing she was most interested in the people behind the places she studied.
“I wanted to understand people and society,” she says. “That was what drew me towards humanities and social sciences.”
After completing a master’s degree at Paris-Sorbonne University, she found a research opportunity at NYUAD focused on the MENA region.
The Family Business Histories project was also closer to home than she initially realized. Members of her extended family have established or run businesses, a connection Mahgoub believes many people across the region can relate to.
“Family is at the heart of everything,” she says. “That comes through again and again in this particular research.”
The stories behind the companies
As Mahgoub and her colleagues record oral histories across different generations, the histories of individual companies can unfold like family sagas, encompassing founders and childhoods, marriages and migrations, disagreements and succession. They then piece those accounts together with archives, books, press reports, and other historical records.
Learn more about the Jashanmal Group through oral histories tracing the family businesses’ emergence into one of the Gulf's oldest retail businesses.
The research can reveal how events far beyond the boardroom changed a company’s course, from wars that forced families across borders to disagreements that resulted in separate businesses, and marriages that reshaped relationships within them.
Mahgoub spends so much time with the recordings that she sometimes feels she knows the people personally before meeting them.
“I’ve listened to them talk about their childhoods, their parents, their cousins, and incredibly personal moments,” she says. “You become completely immersed in these families.”
The oral histories also reveal how families often cultivated business relationships at home. Mothers, sisters, and wives hosted gatherings, maintained connections with business partners, and helped families navigate periods of disagreement or succession, with conversations around the dinner table often shaping a company’s development.
“You cannot hear the story of these businesses without hearing about the women,” Mahgoub says. “They are integral to the history.”
Together, these accounts offer a broader picture of how commerce developed across the region, carrying histories of migration, kinship, trade, and social change that help explain how communities and economies evolved alongside it.
“What we didn’t realize at the beginning was that we were helping establish a research area,” Mahgoub says. “That intersection of family, business, and history is still largely unexplored.”
Opening the archive with AI
Mahgoub now wants to make those histories easier to explore. She and the team are developing an AI-powered archival database trained on their own research material. Users could eventually ask questions about the region’s family business histories and receive answers grounded in sources the researchers collected and structured.
“We want to embed methods of historical inquiry into an AI system,” she says. “It has to understand the sources and answer questions about the past as accurately as possible.”
The project brings together historians and technology specialists and could take around a year to reach a fuller working version. For Mahgoub, its potential lies in giving families, researchers, and the public new means of recovering a history that has often survived through memories scattered across generations.
I hope we can build one of the pioneering AI models in this part of the world trained on local data. I want to see how far we can take historical accuracy with this technology.
After years spent gathering accounts, Mahgoub is now looking at how those histories can reach far beyond the families who first told them.
“These stories tell us where families came from, how they survived, and how they built what came next,” she says. “Now we have the opportunity to preserve histories that have remained fragmented, bring their sources together,and make them accessible for the future.”
