Shimaa ElyoussefInside a traditional kitchen, an elderly woman in a traditional dress that draws its colours from the Black Sea lovingly prepares a spread of local dishes: kuymak, kaygana, cornbread, and stuffed cabbage rolls, arranged prominently on a table inside a home built in the coastal style of Türkiye’s Trabzon region.
The family waits to welcome a guest whose presence has long felt like a dream come true: Egyptian ‘Pharaoh’ Mohamed Salah, sitting with his new Turkish family, greeted with kisses and embraces in a promotional video produced by Trabzonspor after his transfer, a deal worth an estimated €34 million over two years through summer 2028.
Arabic social media turned it into something else entirely: drama and comedy sketches built by social media users, showing Salah in full Ottoman sultan regalia, gold-embroidered jacket, sultan-style trousers, a thick moustache closer to a Turkish drama star than a footballer, addressed with lines like "Salah Bey, for God's sake, pass the ball," "Come on, uncle, take the shot," "Please, boss, don't leave me on the bench."
The humour runs on a specific incongruity Egyptian audiences recognise instantly: Salah, a footballer known for being quiet and disciplined, reimagined in the overheated emotional register of a dubbed Turkish soap, where every exchange sounds like a matter of life, death, and forbidden love.
The joke is about hearing football, the driest genre of commentary there is, forced into that melodramatic key.
Lines like "for God's sake, pass the ball" lean on stock begging-and-flattery constructions Egyptians have heard a thousand times from a jilted lover or a desperate servant, never from a football fan, and watching someone address a Premier League forward with that same breathless devotion is the punchline.
It carries a layer of self-mockery too: Egyptians are laughing not just at Salah in a fez, but at their own decades-long addiction to the dramatic cadence of Syrian-dubbed Turkish soaps, recognising the joke because they are, themselves, the audience that voice was built for.
Over the years, dubbed Turkish serials have been the go-to source of entertainment for Syrians, especially during the dark days under the now-deposed authoritarian ruler Bashar al Assad.
Two decades in the making
That instant recognition is the product of a specific industry decision made twenty years ago: dubbing Turkish drama into Syrian dialect, not classical Arabic, not Egyptian, not any other regional voice.
Egyptian art critic Khairia El-Bishlawy says Arab audiences favour Syrian dialect for its closeness to classical Arabic, and credits Syrian dubbing actors for so fully inhabiting Turkish scenes that the original language effectively disappeared, unknown to most Arab viewers.
"Arab audiences have embraced Turkish drama in the Syrian voice for years now, to the point that when they experience the work itself, they only engage with it through that same Syrian dialect," she tells TRT World.
Muhanna Bilal Al-Rashid, assistant professor of Arabic language and history at Mardin Artuklu University in Türkiye, reads the Salah memes as a direct replay of that same conditioning.
"The memes read as though they were lifted straight from a Turkish series, revealing just how much Syrian dialect has shaped the way Arab audiences receive reality, culture, and art."
He credits specific voices for building that muscle memory: Maxim Khalil, Muhannad in Noor; Khaled El-Qish, Sultan Suleiman in Muhteşem Yüzyıl; Lama Al-Shamandi, Elin in The Cost of My Life.
The economics explain why Syria, specifically, became the voice. Turkish production is expensive, $500,000 per episode, $240,000 per hour, generating over $1 billion in export revenue across 170 countries and reaching 500 million Arab viewers.
Dubbing costs a fraction of that: script translation up to $50 an hour, voice actors paid $2 an hour, and today streaming platforms like Netflix and Shahid pay $5,000 to $15,000 per dubbed episode against a production cost as low as $3,000.
Syrian economist Amr Al-Mallah frames it plainly: Arab satellite channels favoured Syrian voice actors as a safer, more commercially attractive bet, one that benefited from pre-existing Arab affection for Levantine dialect, especially after years of Ramadan dramas set in the Levant building that audience.
"The economics behind Syrian dubbing turned it into a brand for Turkish drama and a marketing tool for these series, not merely a technical substitute for the Turkish language," he tells TRT World.
That bet started with Gumuş, translated as Noor, the 2005 series that sent Syrian dubbing studio Sama Art International after Turkish drama in earnest.
Its finale drew 85 million Arab viewers and is credited with a real bump in Arab tourism to Türkiye.
The floodgates opened in 2007 with Wreath of Roses, 40 episodes stretched to 80 for Arab scheduling, and by now more than 100 series have been dubbed into Syrian voice, out of dozens of Damascus studios like Al-Zahra Centre built for exactly this trade.
Egypt, despite producing 60 series a year and 420 works of film and television overall, never built a comparable stake in this specific export; Syria's own drama output, by comparison, is a modest 21 productions.
Egyptian director Amir Ramses notes that interest in Turkish drama itself has since dipped among younger Arab viewers as Korean drama competes for the same audience, yet the Syrian voice attached to two decades of it hasn't gone anywhere.
The joke that proves the voice never left
Which is exactly what makes the memes worth pondering. Nobody needed to explain the reference.
The former Liverpool star’s transfer announcement was instantly, automatically rendered in the cadence of a dubbed Turkish soap, because that is the only way tens of millions of Arabs have ever experienced Turkish drama.
Al-Mallah calls this the natural next chapter for an industry that spent two decades as a commercial product and has now become something else.
"Syrian dubbing was yesterday's commercial product. Today, it has become a maker of digital humour and memes."
The joke about Salah isn't really a joke about Salah, or even about Türkiye.
It's proof that a dubbing decision made in a Damascus studio in 2005 still runs, uncredited, in the back of the region's collective sense of humour.
This story was published in collaboration with Egab
