The ‘Oprah’ of Egypt Reigns Supreme

Only seconds before going live, the director was screaming his final instructions to the excited studio audience. “Can we settle down please? This is the world’s most popular Arabic talk show and I expect you to conduct yourselves accordingly.”

Then: “Hala Sarhan is the host and I hope you’ll give her a fitting welcome.”

The 200 men, women and children in the studio on the outskirts of Cairo broke into warm applause as Sarhan made her grand entry with an ear-to-ear smile and a loving look at the appreciative crowd.

“What a beautiful audience we have here tonight,” she says.

And so begins another “Yahala”--”Hello”--perhaps the Arab world’s most watched talk show and certainly the most controversial.

“Yahala”--a pun on Sarhan’s first name--was the Arab world’s first American-style talk show when it started nearly 10 years ago. The novelty of interactive television soon turned into shock when the program began to deal with topics that are taboo among Arabs, like sex, and to tackle politically sensitive subjects like Arab-American relations.

“I think I am the first Arab woman to utter the word ‘sex’ on television,” says Sarhan, a U.S.-educated Egyptian who sees herself as “part Oprah Winfrey, part Barbara Walters.”

Sarhan is often accused of sensationalism, arrogance, irreverence, even pornography.

“If they criticize me, then they are watching my program,” she counters.

Mohammed Hassan, a former “Yahala” executive, believes the program merely provides balance for the “reactionary and [Muslim] fundamentalist” material also aired on the satellite network Arab Radio and Television that broadcasts “Yahala” to some 10 million viewers as far afield as Australia, Canada and South America.

“The success of ‘Yahala’ is largely due to an excellent team of researchers and [Sarhan’s] own charisma,” Hassan said.

One fan, Cairo homemaker Ibtisam Ahmed, finds Sarhan “professional . . . she doesn’t do what other talk show hosts do, which is interrupting guests all the time.”

In a “Yahala” program titled “Our Mother America,” Sarhan spoke of the U.S. as “the dream and the nightmare, the judge and the executioner” before one of her guests called on Arabs to fight Americans in a jihad, or holy struggle.

A show on “Sexual Perversion” featured a Lebanese man, his face digitally masked, speaking about his sexual identity crisis. “I have a male sexual organ but it doesn’t function,” he said.

Sarhan recalls a female university teacher wearing the Islamic veil whom she invited as a guest on a program called “Divorce Begins in Bed.” The lecturer refused to discuss sex, deeming it inappropriate for television. The audience applauded the teacher, but also applauded Sarhan when she countered: “If the Koran, which is Islam’s holy book, talks about sex, why cannot we?”

Sarhan screamed in disbelief: “You guys are ridiculous!”

“They knew that the program’s subject was to be sex in marriage,” the host says in an interview in her luxury apartment in Cairo’s upscale Dokki district.

“I don’t try to change people, I just want them to think,” she declares. “In Arab societies, we love hypocrisy. Arab societies show us red lights and ask us to stop. My program says, ‘Please, make it green, so we can cross.’ ”

Sarhan says “Yahala” gives a Middle East twist to the tested formula of U.S. talk shows. To assert the program’s pan-Arab appeal, “Yahala” has been beamed live from a dozen countries, including conservative Saudi Arabia, maverick Libya and relatively liberal Lebanon.

In her mid-40s, Sarhan has worked for years in broadcast and print media. The native of Cairo writes a satirical column in a Cairo weekly magazine and has written six books, mostly dealing with social issues.

She also wrote the story of the 1997 Egyptian box-office hit “Dentella,” a film that deals with polygamy through the story of two best friends who fall in love with the same man and end up sharing him in marriage.

“I am always doing two things at the same time, maybe it has something to do with being a twin,” she says of her busy schedule.

Sarhan’s own life could make a provocative “Yahala” episode. Mother of a teenage son, she had an acrimonious and intensely publicized divorce from Imadeddin Adeeb, himself an Arab-world TV celebrity with a talk show on a rival network. She told a interviewer recently that her marriage was “cruel, painful, sad and disappointing.”