Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. The first Muslim oriented sitcom is about to premiere on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s TV lineup.
That’s right- ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’ is scheduled to debut this coming Tuesday. The CBC has also launched a website celebrating the show’s humor with clips, bio’s and other interesting stuff (most of which is pretty funny).
Naturally, Canada’s improved paper of record has the lowdown:
TORONTO — The international news media has descended upon Toronto in recent weeks, all to report on a new CBC comedy that has yet to air but has a tantalizingly sexy title: Little Mosque on the Prairie.
It’s gratifying yet also a bit puzzling to the show’s creator, Zarqa Nawaz, a 39-year-old filmmaker who’s the heart and soul of Little Mosque, a comedy about Muslims living in a small Canadian Prairie town that premieres Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. EST.
“To be honest, a lot of people who are writing about it haven’t even seen it yet,” says Nawaz after noshing on one of hundreds of free chicken shawarmas being handed out Thursday in the city’s downtown Dundas Square as part of a promotional campaign for the show.
“I think people are assuming because of the title and the subject matter that it’s going to be really controversial and political. But it’s just a comedy that happens to have Muslim people in it, and it’s meant to make people laugh. It’s about relationships and human interactions and life in a rural setting. But it’s really the first comedy of its kind in North America, and that’s why it’s so intriguing.”
CNN and BBC Radio are among the news outlets that have covered the story. Paula Zahn Now was to air a segment on the show on Thursday night after a CNN crew visited the west-end Toronto set on Wednesday. The New York Times, The Associated Press, the Houston Chronicle and countless American blogs have all run items on Little Mosque.
In a decidedly un-CBC-like promotional event for Little Mosque, a band of friendly camels was on hand Thursday, including one beast who happily shared a shawarma with one of the show’s stars, Boyd Banks. Banks plays the resident redneck on the show who is ever suspicious of the goings-on in the mosque in the fictional town of Mercy.
“It’s been a fun role to play, because let’s face it, after Sept. 11, we all had racist thoughts,” Banks says. “I know I had them, and I’m not proud of that. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if this show could end some of the prejudices that people have about Muslims.”
All the international attention being paid to the show might suggest Little Mosque is dark, edgy and daring in its comedy. But in fact, there’s no danger of a fatwa here: the show possesses a gentle humour, poking sweet fun not just at misconceptions about Muslims, but also at rural Canadians, that popular national whipping boy, the city of Toronto, and Muslims themselves.
“The enemy is in your kitchen …. wine gums, rye bread, licorice — Western traps designed to seduce Muslims to drink alcohol!” the Imam Baber, played by Manoj Sood, says to eye-rolling from some in his congregation. He’s ousted during the first episode due to his overly conservative beliefs to make room for the progressive and handsome young Torontonian, Amaar, who complains bitterly about his inability to find a cappuccino in Mercy.
Amaar, played by Zaib Shaikh, has one of the funniest lines in the premiere episode, stating dryly and sardonically: “Muslims around the world are known for their sense of humour” as he’s falsely accused of being a terrorist.
Future episodes promise more laughs, especially one in which two Muslim characters are shocked to learn that a man has replaced their female swimming instructor. The discovery forces the women to wear their full veils before submerging themselves in the pool.
Nawaz, a mother of four who’s lived in Saskatchewan for 10 years, denies reports that the CBC hired a consultant to ensure the show was not in any danger of offending Muslims. In fact, she says, any process of that nature simply involved her bouncing jokes off friends.
“There was no official outside consultant,” she says with a laugh. “I think that’s part of what has sparked so much interest in the show — the thought that it might anger Muslims, how would they react, et cetera. But there is really nothing in the show that could offend Muslims.”
Executive producer Mary Darling, who giddily snapped photographs of the camels at Thursday’s event as she balanced her six-month-old baby on her hip, says the show is primarily designed to make people laugh — but if it also helps erase misconceptions about Muslims, all the better.
“It’s just a funny comedy about two communities doing very ordinary things together and I think that, ultimately, that’s what will build bridges between the Muslim community and the rest of the population with this show,” she said. “It’s really just about people. It shows time and time again that we’re really all just one.”
Humor has always been a great way to bring people together, defusing tensions and differences and highlighting our essential, common humanity.
The Discomfort Of Strangers
January 6, 2007
The Discomfort of Strangers is an essay by David Goodhart “challenging liberals to rethink their attitudes to diversity and the welfare state has provoked a bitter debate among progressive thinkers.”
The essay was first published (in 2 parts), in it’s entirety, in The Guardian.
From the first part of the essay
: “…And therein lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies: sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity (high social cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system) and diversity (equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life). The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about trade-offs. It also suggests that the left’s recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed….”
Moreover, modern liberal societies cannot be based on a simple assertion of group identity – the very idea of the rule of law, of equal legal treatment for everyone regardless of religion, wealth, gender or ethnicity, conflicts with it. On the other hand, if you deny the assumption that humans are social, group-based primates with constraints, however imprecise, on their willingness to share, you find yourself having to defend some implausible positions…”
The second part of the essay is equally provocative:
“…When solidarity and diversity pull against each other, which side should public policy favour? Diversity can increasingly look after itself – the underlying drift of social and economic development favours it. Solidarity, on the other hand, thrives at times of adversity, hence its high point just after the second world war and its steady decline ever since as affluence, mobility, value diversity and (in some areas) immigration have loosened the ties of a common culture. Public policy should therefore tend to favour solidarity in four broad areas.
…Negotiating the tension between solidarity and diversity is at the heart of politics. But both left and right have, for different reasons, downplayed the issue. The left is reluctant to acknowledge a conflict between values it cherishes; it is ready to stress the erosion of community from “bad” forms of diversity, such as market individualism, but not from “good” forms of diversity, such as sexual freedom and immigration. And the right, in Britain at least, has sidestepped the conflict, partly because it is less interested in solidarity than the left, but also because it is still trying to prove that it is comfortable with diversity.”
Read parts one and two of Goodhart’s essay. It is an eye opener. SC&A will comment later on, in another post. For now, we want to hear what you have to say.
This post was originally posted on May 9, 2005.
