Cognitive radio (CR) MAC protocol provides access control of unused spectrum resources without causing interference to primary users. To achieve this goal, in this paper a TDMA based cooperative multi-channel cognitive radio MAC (MCR-MAC) protocol is proposed for wireless ad hoc networks to provide reliable protection for primary users by achieving cooperative detection of incumbent system signals around the communication pair. Each CR node maintains transmission opportunity schedules and a list of available channels that is employed in the neighbor discovery period. To avoid possible signal collision between incumbent systems and cognitive radio ad hoc users, we propose a simple but efficient emergency notification message exchanging mechanism between neighbor CR nodes with little overhead. Our simulation results show that the proposed MCR-MAC can greatly reduce interference with primary users and remarkably improve the network throughput.