Is the Middle East ready for Zainab Salbi’s new talk show? With her cropped hair, long suede boots and gold, hooped earrings, the 46-year-old activist is glamorous and distinctive. But after dedicating 20 years to the harrowing work of helping women in war and conflict zones, hosting a primetime talk show is a surprising career twist.
It’s certainly an ambitious one – guests have included Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton and Donna Karan. And the primetime show, which premiered last month on the Discovery Channel’s TLC network, is being broadcast in 22 countries across the Middle East and North Africa. Yet none of this scratches the surface of Salbi’s real aim for the programme: to inspire women to not only change their lives, but to also change the culture of the region. While the famous names may add sparkle, the show will be a success, she says, if it bridges divides and starts a discussion about “issues that the culture is not comfortable addressing in public”.
The most hard-hitting interviews in the first series of the programme are with two young, Yezidi women who were captured and raped by Islamic State, she says. To have women talking “on Arab TV in Arabic” about the details of the sexual attacks they have endured, is taboo-busting, Salbi says, in a region where discussing any sexual activity – even rape, is seen as dishonourable.
“Usually, it is easier to give [a story like this] to the western media,” she says. “The reason people don’t talk is not fear but shame ... [women] are supposed to think about shame, and that they should be silent.”
Other guests, says Salbi, include a transgender man and his religiously conservative family, who love him; an Egyptian mother who left school at 12, but is now fighting against female genital mutilation, and a young man who, because he is illegitimate, has faced enormous institutional and personal discrimination.
Salbi has a lifetime’s experience in encouraging women to speak out . Her gilded childhood was blighted by her father’s job as a pilot for Saddam Hussein. While the position brought the family material comfort, it also dragged her parents into an all-consuming “friendship” with a man who thought nothing of murdering those who displeased him.
When Salbi was 20, her mother, who had always encouraged her daughter’s independence and education, pressured her into an arranged marriage in the US. Her new husband was abusive and raped her, so she fled – only to find herself cut off from her family when the Gulf war broke out. Later, she discovered her mother had insisted on the match because she feared her daughter would be raped by Hussein – a fate that had befallen her friends – and, Salbi believes – her mother herself.
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