Ahmad or Adam?

My name is … This can be the easiest gap to be filled for anyone and it is one of the first sentences to be taught to us by our parents. However, while everything is clear to me, there are some confusions about my name outside which I decided to clarify in this article.

Of course, my name is Ahmad. I cannot be prouder of my name and my great and lovely parents who chose such a beautiful name for me with all their love and care. My name is short and easy to pronounce. It has a great meaning as well; ‘most praised’. There seems to be nothing wrong, but I did feel at some point of time that my name is stopping me to proceed in my career. As described, there is nothing wrong about the name itself, but the stereotypes connected to my name were putting me many steps back in the minds of people who don’t know me from before. I need to be extremely better that for example someone called ‘Adam’ to be seen, by a group of people, as equal. And this group of special people can be important decision makers for the future of my career.

I came to Sweden in 2007 from a traditional and business family in Kerman, Iran. Kerman is the city of pistachio, carpet, and copper in Iran. A beautiful and lovely city in the middle of dessert. My grandfather and grand grandfather did trade between Iran and neighbor countries and worked in traditional Bazaar in Kerman. I never lived outside of my city or even my parents’ home until I moved to Stockholm in 2007 to study at KTH and make an international and successful career.

I think anyone reading this article would know how my name is connected to some negative stereotypes. I even don’t like to write too much details but let me give an example. I never used YouTube in Iran and when I came to Stockholm, I still remember well that I was excited and curious to watch videos on YouTube. Naturally, one of the first words that I searched on YouTube was my first name and I saw this video:

I was shocked and devastated. I had very hard time to digest the video. It is of course a joke and comedy which I deeply appreciate, and we need to have more of those for a happier life but the stigma and stereotype that it would bring to my name is unimaginable. I read all the comments, but I didn’t see anyone raising the fact that there are many Ahmads around the world who are/were not terrorist! I am not going to enter to that conversation on how many people are innocently killed by Ahmads or how many people were killed by Georges around the world. This is irrelevant to this conversation. My point is that how this can be hard to digest for a young and ambitious individual who moved to Sweden to make good for the world. It was very early in my career that I realized my fight is not only to become better myself, but I need to fight against stigma and stereotypes that there are nothing to do with me, my family and even any close to any person that I knew or met in my entire life in Iran.

To make a career or do something good in the society, it took me long time to make people brush away stereotypes and see real me without any pre-judgements by my name. Of course, people are very different, and this can be a different depending who I meet. It is true that I met many people in my career that they never judged me by my name, and they were super welcoming and open-minded or at least pretend to be like that. But I have to say that I met people who had hard time to think beyond those stereotypes. Those people could be main decision makers for my career. For example, I have been to a job interview that people asked me: ‘how do you feel to have a female boss?’ I was surprised and it was very natural to me that it doesn’t matter if it is man or woman. I like to work and do good for society and business and the gender of my boss is the least thing I would think about. So, the question was that how much I can change the mind of such a person in like 2 min with my answer? If that persons even think that I have such male dominant character that it is even possible that I see women below men based on my ethnicity or name, then it is so hard to change this in such a short time. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t try, and I won’t try; I did and will definitely do in the future but the energy, which could go to make good for the business and our society, goes to changing stereotypes and stigmas that are simply wrong or at least not related to me at all.

It is a super sad story, but I am not definitely sad. I am even more energized. I see the problem and I can make my individual share of influence to maybe change it a bit during my lifetime. I am even motivated to make a basis which can support further changes after me. I fully know that my life is short, and I need to move and do good things that I plan to do before I die.

My approach is to first accept and live with these facts; these dark facts about our society. I described those facts in my past article called Social Medieval Period. However, I need to make best of that for myself and continue doing good for our society and our world. I need to be realistic that I cannot change the world stereotype which are built during the many years. But I can adapt and make my share of good influences.

So, I decided to choose business nickname. This is not the story of shame, but it is all about how one can adapt to live a life he/she deserves. There is nothing officially changed. I chose 'Adam' as my business nickname. I chose the name among many other names because it means ‘human’ and this is the best description of me as first impression in business environments. Then, with that impression, I am happy to discuss my expertise and qualifications or discuss a business deal.

To sum-up, in the era of climate change to be the existential threat to all of us and diversity to be at the core of building modern societies, I am doing my best to make major contribution to develop sustainable industries and promote diversity. I am realistically ambitious to make good for our world and I am happy to make compromises. Choosing a business nickname seems to be a small compromise, but it reveals the sad and dark fact of our time. I never thought that I would have no option to make such compromise and, it still happened to me. But I will do my best that this never happens to any Ahmad, Xu, Eric, Emelie, Anna, Pedro, Akiko, Jain, Kumar or any other name in the future.

Disclaimer: This article is purely my ideas and reflect and represent my personal views.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.