By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

ISTANBUL - A topless hunk lights candles in the bedroom.

A woman appears in the doorway.
“Come on, let’s not be late,” she begs him, although her dark brown eyes say something different.

Just another day at the office for the stars of “Gumus,” the Turkish soap opera that during its two-year run on Kanal D has offered Turks not only the daytime-television miracle of sexual foreplay, but the standard compendium of crazy plot twists.

Usual stuff to Americans. But Turkish television has given the soap opera a fresh twist by making the connivers, kidnappers and adulterers Muslims. And Arab audiences have been swept off their feet.

Led by “Gumus” (“Noor” in Arabic), a wave of Turkish melodramas, police procedurals and conspiracy thrillers - and now the steamy “Ask-i Memnu,” the top-rated series in Turkey - are making their way onto Arab televisions, wielding a kind of soft power.

Through the small screen, Turkey has begun to exercise a big influence on Arab culture of a sort that the United States can only dream about. Turkey’s cultural exports, not coincidentally, have also advanced its political ambitions as it asserts itself on that front, too .

Arab women have made clear their particular admiration for the rags-to-riches story of the title character in “Noor,” a strong, business- savvy woman with a doting husband named Muhannad. Dr. Shafira Alghamdi, a Saudi pediatrician who was on vacation in Istanbul this month, volunteered how Arab husbands often ignore their wives. On “Noor,” within what remains to Arabs a familiar context of arranged marriages, Noor and Muhannad openly love and admire each other.

“A lot of Saudi men have gotten seriously jealous of Muhannad because their wives say, ‘Why can’t you be more like him?’ ” Dr. Alghamdi said. Meanwhile, she was illustrating another consequence of the show: the sudden, spectacular boom in Arab tourism to Turkey. Millions of Arabs flock here. Turkish Airlines has started direct flights to gulf countries .

Even fatwas by Saudi clerics calling for the murder of the soap’s distributors have not discouraged a store in Gaza City from selling copies of Noor’s sleeveless dresses . A recent cartoon in a Saudi newspaper showed a homely Saudi man visiting a plastic surgeon, toting a picture of Noor’s husband, who is played by Kivanc Tatlitug, a blue-eyed former basketball player who also plays the philandering Adonis in “Ask-i-Memnu.” The man in the cartoon asks the surgeon if he can get Mr. Tatlitug’s stubbled good looks.

“Arab men say they don’t watch these shows but they watch,” said Arzum Damar, who works for Barracuda Tours in Istanbul. It’s true. A Hamas leader not long ago was describing plans by his government to start a network of Shariah-compliant TV entertainment when his teenage son arrived, complaining about his sister’s taste for the Turkish soap operas. Then the son’s cellphone rang.

The ring tone was the theme song from “Noor.”

If this seems like a triumph of Western values by proxy, the Muslim context remains the crucial bridge.

“Ultimately, it’s all about local culture,” said Irfan Sahin, the chief executive of Dogan TV Holding, Turkey’s largest media company, which owns Kanal D. “People respond to what’s familiar.”

By which he meant that regionalism, not globalism, sells, as demonstrated by the finale of “Noor” last summer . A record 85 million Arab viewers tuned in.

“You have to understand that there are people still living even in this city who say they only learned how to kiss or learned there is kissing involved in lovemaking by watching ‘Noor,’ ” explained Sengul Ozerkan, a professor of television in Istanbul. “So you can imagine why the impact of that show was so great in the Arab world and why ‘Ask-i Memnu’ may be too much.”

“But then, Turkey always acts like a kind of intermediary between the West and the Middle East,” she added.

Or as Sina Kologlu, the television critic for Milliyet, a Turkish daily, phrased it the other day: “U.S. cultural imperialism is finished.”

Ali Demirhan is a Turkish construction executive whose company in Dubai plans to help stage the next Turkish Emmys there. One recent morning he was at a mall here, sipping coffee while Arabs shopped nearby. “In the same way American culture changed our society, we’re changing Arab society,” Mr. Demirhan said, then paused for dramatic effect. “If America wants to make peace with the Middle East today, it must first make peace with Turkey.”


Turkey’s soap operas are popular in the Arab world. A scene from ‘‘Ask-i-Memnu.’’ / DOGAN TV