Iftah Ya Simsim is recorded in this encyclopedia from the source named below.
Overview
Iftah Ya Simsim (Arabic: افتح يا سمسم; meaning "Open Sesame") is the first international co-production of the American children's television series Sesame Street created in the Arabian world. It premiered in Kuwait and Morocco on September 14, 1979, and was broadcast in 22 Arabic-speaking countries, running until June 23, 1989. The program remained well-known decades after it went off the air. A few months after its premiere, Iftah Ya Simsim became one of the most popular and successful children's programs in many Arab states. Critics called it "one of the most successful pan-Arab collaborations of educators, creators, writers and artists from the Middle East". The show inspired many studies, which demonstrated that children benefited from watching it. In 2010, efforts began to revive the show for a new generation of young viewers in the Arab world. In late 2013, fifteen writers and producers from Bidaya Media attended training about its educational methodology and production techniques from the staff of the American show in New York. Iftah Ya Simsim was in pre-production in March 2014, and the first phase of auditions took place in April 2014. The new series debuted on September 1, 2015. The present show is a collaboration between the Abu Dhabi Education Council, Twofour54, Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States, and Bidaya Media.
Source and reuse
The descriptive text above is drawn from the English-language encyclopedia article Iftah Ya Simsim, reused under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence and attributed in the sources block on this page. Figures in the infobox come from Wikidata and carry that project's own provenance; they should be checked against the cited source before being relied on.
Editorial note
This record is a sourced summary, not original research. Where the underlying material is silent on a point, this article is silent too. Last reviewed 2026-09-23.