Lebanese girls buy pictures of the Turkish stars of the TV drama 'Noor' displayed at a street stall the southern in the city of Saida Photo by: AFP

“I adore it!”, says Safaa Abdel Hadi, a sixty five year-old woman from Cairo, while speaking about the series “Nour”. It is charming just like Mexican or American series. Moreover, the family in the series is Muslim; that is why we are more compassionate with the protagonists. “They look like us”, added Ibtissam Issa, a Lebanese Muslim housewife. “I appreciate their attachment to religion and their solidarity as a family”, she explained. However, the series shows a woman who leaves the marital home with her baby to live alone in an apartment; and another woman who gets pregnant before her marriage, and this may chock some fans. “We should not get deluded because the series reflects the culture and the problems of the Westerners and not ours”, says Nadia Abdel Rahmane, a thirty four year-old Egyptian woman.

In order not to hurt the “sensibility” of the Arab audience, the dubbing company in Damas managed to censure the private scenes called “wrong scenes”. “Sama’s production had a master stroke when it chose to dub the series into spoken Arabic with the Syrian accent, appreciated by the Arabic audience by reason of the successful Syrian series. And it is specially the actor Kivanç Tatlitug, alias Mohannad – blond man, blue eyes, devastating smile- who makes these ladies hearts beat so fast, insomuch that some Arabic televisions declared that many jealous husbands wanted to divorce their spouses because of him. Even the mufti of Saudi Arabia recently pronounced a fatwa against this series, judged “subversive” and “anti-Islamic”, and affirmed that the channel which broadcasts this series is considered as the “enemy of God and its prophet”. Paradoxically, the Saudi satellite, MBC, broadcasts the series and it even organized a dinner in Dubai last summer to honor the two main protagonists; an event that caused a general hysteria.