Yasmin Elhady sees a connection between good barbecue and good relationships: They’re both cooked “low and slow,” she says.

Elhady overflows with insightful zingers like that. She has the uncommon perspective of someone born in Cairo, Egypt and raised in Huntsville, Alabama.

Elhady’s also a big part of what makes ABC’s “Muslim Matchmaker” work. Even if you normally think dating shows are lame.

On the show, professional matchmakers Elhady and Hoda Abrahim help fellow Muslim Americans look for lasting love in the digital age, while staying true to their faith.

In the 2020s, dating’s often determined by swiping left or right on apps. And abrupt ghosting. But Elhady and Abrahim’s approach on “Muslim Matchmaker,” also streaming on Hulu, centers on a more soulful approach, the “rules of three.”

It goes like this. Give someone three dates before deciding go or no. If you proceed, then give the relationship three months before deciding again whether to continue or not. Within those three months, explore with that person 300 questions Elhady and Abrahim say can predict long-term relationship viability.

“This show is saying give people your time and your attention,” Elhady says. “That is going to be the thing that serves you the best and serves the other person the best. That is not how we’ve operated for centuries, millennia as human beings. All of your best friends did not become best friends overnight.”

On a recent morning, Elhady, who’s also an attorney, checked in for a video interview from her law firm on the East Coast. Striking, sharply dressed and wearing a hijab, her style’s worthy of a jet-setting Bond girl.

“Muslim Matchmaker” is the rare dating show that makes you feel smarter from watching instead of dumber.

It’s also a rare mainstream glimpse into contemporary Muslim American life.

Through the matchmaking arcs, non-Muslim viewers are hipped to terms like desi (a person of South Asian descent), halal (actions permissible within Islam) and haram (impermissible within Islam). Also, for Muslims the pursuit of an ever-spouse is a huge part of their faith.

“We wanted the audience to feel really engaged and interested in what Muslim Americans look like across the country,” Elhady says. “We’re experiencing the same challenges that many people are, whether that be issues related to anxiety about your body type or your age or your culture or whether the parents are going to be accepting of you.”

Elhady and Abrahim’s contrasting personalities add to “Muslim Matchmaker” texture. As Elhady puts it, “I call myself a grumpy old man in a woman’s body, and she’s bright eyed and hopeful.”

Elhady and Abrahim met at a wedding about 10 years ago. Although Elhady hadn’t matched the couple, she’d helped them with compatibility testing. At the wedding, Abrahim saw Elhady scoping out a beautiful woman there she wanted to add to her matchmaking roster.

“And so she [Abrahim] looked at me and she’s like, ‘Are you matchmaking?’” Elhady recalls. “And I was like, ‘Yes. How did you know?’ She’s like, ‘Well, I’m a matchmaker. Can I work for you? Can you teach me everything?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely. Come and work for me,’ and so she became my assistant.”

When Elhady went full-time into law, she turned over her matchmaking biz and methodology to Abrahim. “She really flourished and started soaring after that,” Elhady says.

Elhady’s early childhood years in Cairo remain vivid for her. Metropolis hustle-bustle filled with culture, family, outdoors and socializing.

Her family’s move to Huntsville — her dad’s an engineer, a common vocation among transients there — was “jarring.” The switch had positives, though.

“The beautiful thing about the South,” Elhady says, “is living in a culture that’s very family oriented, nature oriented, and very much togetherness and community.”

Elhady’s Huntsville haunts included a dollar-movie theater and Airport Drive restaurant Surin of Thailand.

Still, she says, “There was a lot of hate, but I turned it around. I looked a little different, so it was really important that I had a good personality, and that I was able to articulate myself. It pushed me out of my shell in many ways when I went to Alabama.

“In the South, they want to know you, they want to love you. They may not understand everything, but there is an openness. If you are smiling and can get people up close, you can’t hate up close. You can only hate from far away.”

Elhady won other kids over. She was elected class president of Grissom High’s class of 2003. Later, she and four of her GHS friends attended Atlanta’s Emory University together. “I’m still best friends with every single one of them,” Elhady says.

A sense of humor led to another Elhady pursuit, standup comedy, which informs her “Muslim Matchmaker” persona.

“If we laugh together, then we can love together,” she says. “And that’s what I really feel like comedy does.”

Elhady has been doing professional matchmaking for 18 years. Between her and Abrahim, she says, more than a hundred of their matches got married.

Elhady says of the 58 she’s personally matched, just two have divorced. “And I think they should have gotten divorced,” she says in hindsight. As an attorney, she says she’s also helped mediate 17 divorces.

Elhady herself is twice divorced. Her current status?

“I am always kind of in a thing, so I’m kind of in a thing, but we’ll see where it goes. I know that I will be in love again and I know I’ll probably get married again. It’ll just be, you know, to the right guy.”

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