Upon arrival in Cambridge for Harvard Law, Mohammad Nooraee faced a weekend before his student housing became available. Knowing no one and with no money for a hotel, he had to spend nights outside – luckily just a couple – on Cambridge Common.
“There’s a bench there that, every single time I drive past, I pause and look at it and remind myself, don’t be too arrogant, don’t be too proud of where you are now. This is where you started,” Nooraee said Wednesday, at ease in his Noor Oriental Rugs business on the border of Cambridge and Belmont.
As a 28-year-old student, still very poor, he had to scrape together outfits from stained and ill-fitting donated garments, a couple of items scrounged out of a single bag at a charity in Dorchester from among women’s clothing.
Now, at 74, he dresses in colorful, tailored business outfits and has a goal of making sure his “street friends” experience the same sense of dignity.
From an enclosed front porch at Noor Oriental Rugs, he hosts the Sufi Boutique to provide donated clothing and interview-ready outfits for free to those in need.
The boutique offers shirts, pants, ties, suits for men and clothing and accessories for women, with stock reflecting the boutique’s mission of quality over quantity. Among the racks a visitor can find Claiborne, Talbot, Ann Taylor and Simply Vera by Vera Wang, Calvin Klein and North Slope by Eddie Bauer. The racks don’t include clothes with stains or tears, or “undignified” clothing – something printed with a message that is “not pleasant,” Nooraee said. Much of the clothing comes from the wealthy, including Nooraee’s neighbors in Boston’s South End neighborhood, but there is also a clothes donation box in front of the rug store.
About 30 percent of donations are brand-new, Nooraee estimated, and often arrives with the tags still on. “Sometimes you receive a gift that you don’t want to wear, for many reasons. I have neighbors in one of the most affluent places in the United States, and instead of their returning clothes back for credit after the Christmas holiday, they donate to us,” he said. The Boutique is also a donation partner for high-end lines such as Polo Ralph Lauren.
Maternity wear is in the mix too. “For women who are pregnant, we make exceptions and we deliver to wherever they are,” Nooraee said. The boutique also makes regular deliveries to nearby homeless shelters and community organizations. Clothing that is dropped off but isn’t right for the boutique gets put in bags for delivery to the Salvation Army.
Roughly two to three dozen customers come in to get clothing each week, and many are regulars. Nooraee said he is constantly surprised by how far many of his patrons travel for good-quality clothing – from communities along the Route 24 corridor, even from out of state – and is glad the boutique is near Alewife Station, a regional hub for public transportation.
Law and business
Nooraee could practice law or – his preference – teach it; he has degrees from the University of Tehran, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. He was recruited out of Harvard by an international law firm.
But while there he was contacted by a Turkish businessman who needed help expanding his rug sales into the United States, and instead of law he decided to pursue his family’s 300-year-old trade of rug weaving.
“A lot of people could do what I was educated for, but there were not many who could do what I was born doing,” said Nooraee, a master weaver whose mother was a wool spinner in Iran.
Over the nine years working in Somerville’s Ball Square, his boss’ health gave out. “So I started to make trips to Middle East on my own,” now self-employed, Nooraee said. The store was moved to Cambridge in 1991 and continued to build its international reputation for restoration, repair, washing, appraisal and sales of Persian and Oriental rugs.
Good works
Nooraee is a Sufi – a spiritually focused branch of Islam – and part of the Nimatullahi Sufi order led by Alireza Nurbakhsh, who in 2008 founded a social service nonprofit called the Sufi Service Committee to expand the order’s good works. The committee has affiliated service groups and volunteer organizations across the world; Nooraee helps lead its efforts in Boston.
Despite already running a Sufi meditation center in Boston, more than two decades ago he began serving food to the unhoused at the 1740 Washington Street Shelter in Boston and was eventually invited to help at the Caspar emergency shelter. His brunches continue every third Sunday of the month, with Nooraee and a group of volunteers cooking fresh, restaurant-worthy food – common American foods such as pasta and burgers, and typically with vegetarian dishes so all can enjoy no matter their dietary restrictions.
The foundational philosophy of Sufism is about “working toward a goal of getting closer to being a kind, loving and accepting person and seeing everything as one unity,” said Dr. Zaid Alhinani, who met Nooraee while a student at Tufts University in the early 2000s. Now a doctor and assistant professor at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, Alhinani comes to work at the boutique when he is in town on vacation and sends donations from overseas when he is not.
After years of inviting shoppers in need to stop in on weekends, Nooraee opened the clothing boutique formally in 2015. Its ribbon-cutting ceremony was attended by former Cambridge mayors David Maher and Marc McGovern.
Volunteers
Alhinani is just one of many devoted volunteers collected by Nooraee. They come from all over – on one Saturday during a reporter’s visit, a local vocational student came to help because Nooraee sparked up a conversation with her at a coffee shop. Another, a formerly unhoused person, recalled being at the Caspar shelter and experiencing one of Nooraee’s brunches: “I remember it being the best food of the month.”
He and his partner, who declined to share their names, met while homeless in Cambridge. Now housed for the past several years, they choose to devote their Saturdays helping people in the position they were once in. She volunteered first, coming to help fold and sort clothes after learning about the boutique a year ago from a mutual friend. When sprained ankles kept her home, he came in her place.
Many area services “seem to either not be aware” of how to treat unhoused people like human beings “or actively violate” those relationships, he said, but Nooraee is different.
Now their Saturdays as volunteers are a sort of “date day.”
On Saturdays, Nooraee’s helpers come in at around 9 a.m. and stay for a few hours to stock and organize clothing. Even more come to enjoy the free lunches Nooraee prepares with a few helping hands. “Freeloaders,” Nooraee joked.
The future
Sufi Boutique recently won the Imagined in Cambridge! Social Innovation Award from the Cambridge Community Foundation, along with a $5,000 prize. That money will go toward Nooraee’s eventual goal of spinning off the boutique as a staffed community resource that stands apart from the rug store. He estimates that will cost $250,000, a sum he hopes to raise primarily through donations.
Noor has had 75,000 customers in the past 44 years, Nooraee said, and they have been a base for the giving that keeps the Sufi Boutique running.
Waseem Afzaal, another of the boutique’s regular volunteers, acknowledged that many people may not be in the position to help financially. “The sincerity of doing work by hand may be more valuable than someone giving a lot of money,” he said.
The Sufi Boutique is at Noor Oriental Rugs, 769 Concord Ave. in the Cambridge Highlands, and open during business hours, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
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