Little Mosque on the Prairie

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As SM regular Badmash notes on the news page, the new sitcom “Little Mosque on the Prairie” has its debut this evening on the CBC, Canada’s public broadcasting network. I hope that many of you Canadian mutineers will check it out and report back on what, from the clips available on the show’s site and news reports, looks like a smart comedy that takes on anti-Muslim prejudice without straying from the tried-and-true writing and directing approaches that make situational comedy work. Here’s the synopsis:

LITTLE MOSQUE ON THE PRAIRIE is a new comedy from CBC Television about a small Muslim community in the prairie town of Mercy, many of whose residents are wary of their new, more “exotic” neighbors. The series takes an unabashedly funny look at the congregation of a rural mosque and their attempt to live in harmony with the often skeptical, even down right suspicious, residents of their little prairie town. The sitcom reveals that, although different, we are all surprisingly similar when it comes to family, love, the generation gap and our attempts to balance our secular and religious lives.

You can get a sense of the show from the CNN report linked above. (If you can’t stand Paula Zahn, forward to 00:38 for the start of actual piece.) The airport scene is classic. The humor is pretty direct and there’s lots of room for slapstick but that’s what makes the format work. Also check out this story about the show from the CBC itself. It’s mercifully Zahnless but shows fewer clips.

Both segments introduce us to the show’s creator, Zarqa Nawaz. This sister is no joke! She’s a British-born, Toronto-raised practicing Muslim mother-of-four, who “had a Bachelor of Science degree from U of T in her hands when she realized that medical schools had screening committees to keep people like her out of the health care system.” She went on to broadcast journalism and film, and has lived for the past ten years in cosmopolitan Regina, capital of Saskatchewan:

The advance attention is gratifying to the show’s creator, Zarqa Nawaz, who huddled on-set recently in a full-length Muslim head scarf while noshing on shepherd’s pie. After all, Nawaz says, she’s writing about what she knows and the issues and characters she holds dear.

“I grew up in a mosque, I got married in a mosque, I spend a lot of time in a mosque – mosque is a really important part of my life,” she says, warming up inside a heated minivan on a chilly autumn day of shooting in the far reaches of Toronto’s west end, currently filling in for the Prairies due to the show’s suddenly compressed shooting schedule. …

Her primary goal for “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” Nawaz says, is that people laugh when they watch it.

“I don’t know what it is about me, but the more serious and outrageous the situation, the funnier it becomes to me and I end up spinning it comedically,” she says…

It isn’t always easy to find humour in current events as a Muslim, Nawaz concedes. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, she says she understood what it was like to be singled out due to race and religion.

“I felt weird. When you grow up in a country, and you don’t know any other country, to suddenly feel like you’re now an outsider in your own community is very strange,” she says.

“But I have to say that Saskatchewan was a great place because smaller communities tend to be more protective of their own, and I had non-Muslim people say to me ‘Don’t feel that we don’t trust you; don’t feel like it was your fault because it wasn’t.’ I did feel like I was protected in Saskatchewan. I am glad I lived there when it happened.” [Link]

Advance reviews in the Canadian press range from raves to more lukewarm assessments, though everyone agrees the premise is smart. Then again, I’m not sure I’d take my assessment of what’s funny or not from a reviewer who says things like this (and an editor who headlines the piece “Allah be Praised!”):

Bottom Line: On a scale of one to 48 virgins, I’d peg Little Mosque’s pilot at 29 1/2 virgins. Though really, who does that “half a virgin” think she’s fooling?

I’d rather take the word of the Canadian mutineers. Check out the show for us tonight and let us know what you think.

58 thoughts on “Little Mosque on the Prairie”

  1. God bless you, Madhu! I haven’t watched it yet myself, and this gives me a chance. Too bad the site doesn’t also have the Rick Mercer Report, ‘coz this week he ‘goes Bollywood’ to Brampton, Ontario with Liberal MP Dr. Ruby Dhalla. Rick Mercer’s a real, rip-roaring funny laugh riot, and Ruby, man, she sure is the gal.

  4. “Little Mosque” depends of offensive stereotypes for its humour.

    Also, while at times funny, I do wonder about how “real” the situation is. I once saw a show about how the Nazis made two propaganda films about the conflict between the British and the Irish. The films, at least according to those who were interviewed who had seen them were quite good. The only problem was that the people in the movies were not Irish. What I mean by that was that the culture of the Irish portrayed in the films in no way reflected actual Irish culture as I guess the Germans who wrote, produced, and acted in the movies never took the time to get to understand the traditions and feel of the Irish people. It just wasn’t important to them because in the end it had nothing to do with the Irish. It was as one commentator of the movies said “Germans talking to Germans”.

    And that is kind of what I am getting with the “Little Mosque” show. In the end it isn’t really about small town Saskatchewan or Muslim communities living within small town Saskatchewan. In the end what it comes down to is just Liberal Urbanite Canadians talking to Liberal Urbanite Canadians, with their political message being far more important to them than whether or not the situation portrayed reflects a real situation in the country accurately enough.

    By the way, why does “The She Mayor” remind me so much of the mayor on South Park?

  5. And that is kind of what I am getting with the “Little Mosque” show. In the end it isn’t really about small town Saskatchewan or Muslim communities living within small town Saskatchewan. In the end what it comes down to is just Liberal Urbanite Canadians talking to Liberal Urbanite Canadians, with their political message being far more important to them than whether or not the situation portrayed reflects a real situation in the country accurately enough.

    I have only seen the promo clips so far, and I admit, those did strike me as a bit over the top. But their purpose is to get you interested enough to watch, and they seem to do that well. The idea of LMoP, as far as I can tell, is not so much representational accuracy as the use of a barely plausible, (or even implausible) premise to drive home the broader message. But every cultural product or literary expression has some ‘message’, and it is naive to expect otherwise.

    Also, the kind of ‘representational infidelity’ – to coin a term – that you bring up, occurs all the time. Did you ask yourself how well Denzel Washington (for example) can represent a 19th Century slave (or freedman for that matter) in a movie about the civil war? Can a late 20th Century ‘assimilated’ American Jew represent pre-WWII Polish Jews in a movie about the Holocaust?

  7. Tom, it’s interesting that you feel the show is written by and for Liberal Urbanite Canadians, because if you look up Sharqa Nawaz, the creator, you will discover that much of the show is based on her own experiences as a Muslim woman in small-town Saskatchewan.

  8. thid is a great show and i hope people realize that the show isn’t making fun of canadians. But, is a way to show what happens (sometimes, and usually) out on the streets of a small city. Which hasn’t opened up to the diversity.