TV show on Muslims defuses hate

Want society to look at us as normal with everyday concerns, says creator

When it comes to producing a funny television show or movie in Canada, producers here have a reliable stable of topics: French-English relations, urban-rural dynamics and anything that involves a bumbling politician or the United States.

But Islam— something of a third rail of comedy throughout the Western world—did not make the list, which is one reason the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s new situation comedy, Little Mosque on the Prairie, is attracting such attention here. “It is a risk doing a sitcom about what can be considered a very touchy subject,” said Kirstine Layfield, executive director of network programming at CBC.

But last Tuesday’s series premiere attracted 2.09 million viewers, impressive in a country where an audience of one million is a runaway hit. The CBC had not had a show draw that size audience in a decade, according to the network.

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The show follows a small group of Muslims in, of all places, a prairie town in Saskatchewan where, in the first episode, the group was trying to establish a mosque in the parish hall of a church. A passer-by, seeing the group praying, rushes to call a “terrorist hot line” to report Muslims praying “just like on CNN,” which touches off a local firestorm.

Hoping to avoid making a stir in the town, the group hires a Canadian-born imam from Toronto who quits his father’s law firm to take the job— career suicide, his father thinks. On the way, he is detained in the airport after being overheard on his cellphone saying, “If Dad thinks that’s suicide, so be it,” adding, “This is Allah’s plan for me.”

Later, a leader of the Muslim group is seen defending to a local person the plan to turn the parish hall into a mosque. “It’s a pilot project,” he says, leading the man to exclaim wide-eyed, “You’re training pilots?!”

A bit hokey, perhaps. But light-hearted moments like these between Muslims and non-Muslims have been few and far between in Canada of late.

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Last year, 13 Muslim men and five youths were arrested in the Toronto area in connection with a suspected plot to attack several targets in southern Ontario. Their case continues to wind through the courts. In September, an inquiry cleared a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, of terrorism accusations—for which the United States deported him to Syria, where he was tortured —based on faulty intelligence from Canadian authorities.

“I want the broader society to look at us as normal, with the same issues and concerns as anyone else,” said Zarqa Nawaz, the show’s creator who based the series loosely on her own experiences as a Muslim woman who moved from Toronto to the prairie.

The CBC has committed to eight episodes of the programme, and is negotiating with the show’s producers for 13 more in the spring.

The show has generally been well received by Muslim leaders, who welcome the light touch it brings to issues that are normally debated in numbing seriousness.

–CHRISTOPHER MASON