SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES

BY: CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE AND KARAM SHOUMALI

BERLIN — As the host of an Arabic-language talk show in Germany, Jafaar Abdul Karim is supposed to be the man with the answers. But his answers are not always what viewers want to hear.

In an episode from January 2017 exploring the rights of a single, unmarried Muslim woman with a child, Sheikh Ahmad Karimah, a scholar at Al Azhar University in Cairo who was a guest on the show, accused Mr. Abdul Karim of “stirring chaos” and “encouraging inappropriate relationships.”

“Why don’t you listen to the perspective of Shariah on this?” the professor said, before stalking off the set.

It is not only delicate issues that prove uncomfortable. On a recent broadcast of Mr. Abdul Karim’s talk show, “Shabab Talk” (shabab is Arabic for “youth”), an Egyptian woman complained that, even after living as a student in Germany for a year, she had made no German friends.

When Mr. Abdul Karim asked the woman whether she spoke German, she struggled to defend herself. “I am trying,” she said. “But it is really a difficult language.”

Over the past eight years, Mr. Abdul Karim, 37, has presided over thousands of uncomfortable questions, pointed opinions, difficult discussions and searing reports, many of which strike at the heart of the culture wars that divide the West and the Middle East.

His enthusiastic charisma, seemingly endless patience and his made-for-selfies good looks have enabled him to succeed despite the hard feelings that are often raised by delving into issues that many conservative Muslims — not to speak of jihadists — usually consider out of bounds.

“He is really one of our stars,” said Ines Pohl, the head of Deutsche Welle, the German television station that produces Mr. Abdul Karim’s show before live audiences.

His star has shone even brighter since 2015, when more than a million refugees — many of them young and Arabic speaking — began to arrive in Germany. Once an apostle for human rights in the Arab world, Mr. Abdul Karim is increasingly being watched and discussed within Germany.

“You could say, it’s the baby that survived the Arab Spring,” he said of the show.

But for all Mr. Abdul Karim’s exuberance, “Shabab Talk” has become a battlefield in a much larger cultural war around the Western concept of human rights, traditional values and how much displaced people should adapt to the countries that accept them.

While Mr. Abdul Karim has made predictable enemies on the right (he was accosted while covering a right-wing rally in Dresden in 2015), he also finds that he is not always welcome in Arab neighborhoods in Berlin, where he has lived for years.

“I was discovered yesterday in Neukölln, and all of the sudden I had 10 guys around me discussing whether what I do is good,” he said of an Arab neighborhood sometimes referred to as “Little Istanbul.”

Writing on the page of a Syrian Facebook group with 245,000 members, a 45-year-old Syrian refugee, Hamadi al-Khaldi, said that Deutsche Welle “has become the channel of gays and atheists that is constantly depicting Syrians this way.”

Some of the group’s members started a hashtag campaign against Mr. Abdul Karim last year, and it resulted in death threats that were deemed serious enough for the German police to get involved.

Since then, he has had a security detail.

Munis Bukhari, the Syrian refugee who runs the Facebook group (and says he had nothing to do with the threats), said that many recently arrived Syrians resent Mr. Abdul Karim. They argue that his show raises what they consider to be taboo issues — like the rights of gays and women — specifically to cast their beliefs in a bad light and to lift the show’s ratings.

“Put simply, Jaafar doesn’t make any serious effort to present Syrians in Germany in a good way,” Mr. Bukhari said in an interview. “On the contrary, he tries to misrepresent them so the show trends.”

Mr. Abdul Karim says that he does not disparage people but tries to make refugees understand the values of the West.

“It’s not Germany versus the Arabic region, it is about human values that are universal,” he said. “Being free is not Western. Being free is universal.”

Like a low-budget cable access show, the set of “Shabab Talk” is bare bones, whether being taped on a dusty square in Kirkuk, Iraq, or in the marble and glass lobby of the German Foreign Ministry, as it was one recent evening. Television screens are strung around to show news reports or guests joining via video link. Otherwise, the focus is on the audience, usually numbering about 100, and on the guests.

During the recent taping in Berlin, a Foreign Ministry official, Michael Roth, sat on one of the stools listening to a simultaneous translation through headphones. The show’s technical production is entirely in German, but Arabic is the language in front of the camera. (Mr. Roth and other non-Arabic speakers are dubbed in the final transmission.) Mr. Abdul Karim and his core staff effortlessly switch between the two languages.

After the last applause died away, Mr. Abdul Karim called in all the guests in for a group selfie. He does this every time he is part of public event.

The earnest desire of his fans to get close to him and to tell him their stories is a sign that despite the heated criticism from some quarters, his message is generally well received.

“I just really admire what he does,” said Mustafa bin Hussain, a 21-year-old refugee from Egypt, who took a bus from Hamburg to Berlin to be in the audience for one of Mr. Abdul Karim’s shows.

Mr. Abdul Karim is reluctant to divulge too much private information, for fear of exposing family members to the harassment he regularly endures. “I keep my private life private to enjoy it away from my work as a public figure,” he said.

He was born into a middle-class Lebanese family but raised in Liberia and educated in Switzerland and Lebanon before moving to Germany to study in 2001. After becoming increasingly visible to Germans — in 2016 he won a national reporting prize — he published a book in German last year chronicling his many visits to the Arab world.

While he remains a lightning rod in the Arabic community in Germany, he stands as a model migrant to most Germans — an educated outsider who by sharing the country’s liberal values has carved out a role for himself in the broader culture. He is a frequent guest on talk shows and a familiar voice in the German-speaking news media. Two years ago, he interviewed Chancellor Angela Merkel in the weeks before the federal elections.

During a recent standing-room-only book event, a recent immigrant asked Mr. Abdul -Karim for his secret to success.

This time, Mr. Abdul -Karim’s answer received raucous applause.

“Don’t wait for anyone to tell you who you are,” he said. “Don’t wait for anyone to tell you what you can be. Don’t wait for anyone to give you the right to be who you want to be.”