REVIEW: Little Mosque On The Prairie
“How about a Little Mosque in your neighbourhood?” asked the tagline of the Canadian series which managed to reference Laura Ingall Wilder’s classic Little House on the Prairie series in its title. Consisting of 91 episodes that are spread over six seasons, Little Mosque on the Prairie (LMOTP) originally aired from 2007 to 2012 on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and later on was picked by Hulu as “Little Mosque”. Created by Zarqa Nawaz, the sitcom is a media product that shows interactions of Canadian Muslims with Canadian non-Muslims as they try to navigate the shared territory that is a fictional town of Mercy.
The show rejects the idea that Muslims in North America are merely a monolith of immigrants who came to seek better lives. Anthony Giddens may argue that what has happened through LMOTP is basically reverse colonisation whereby non-Western countries are influencing Western societies. But the show challenges what is traditionally accepted as “Western” by showcasing how Western societies as we know them have been built by immigrant populations who make up an important and yet very normal part of the citizenry. Muslims like Lebanese Yasir Hamoudi, his Canadian daughter Rayyan and convert wife Sarah, are all breadwinners and all are contributing to the Canadian economy. Rayyan is a medical practitioner, Yasir is a contractor, and Sarah works for the mayor’s public relations department. The Hamoudi family has a story as do many of the communities of Muslims but very often those stories are not given space on the mainstream media. Furthermore, the experience of leaving one’s home country and moving to Canada is not something unique to Muslim populations. “I asked Anton Leo, the head of comedy for CBC Television, why he had decided to green-light Little Mosque on the Prairie all those years ago. He said he was the son of Italian immigrants and my tales of being a daughter of Pakistani immigrants resonated with him. They were universal,” wrote the show’s creator Zarqa Nawaz in The Globe and Mail. While the show has found an audience in Hulu and “obscure online networks”, it has not yet been remade by an American network even though the right to its format was sold to 20th Century Fox in 2008. “We didn’t have 9/11, and we have a public broadcast. 9/11 affected the American psyche in a major way, and you have to be sensitive to that,” said Zarqa Nawaz. By expanding the audience for Muslim comedy and showing stories of Muslims in conflict and cooperation with non-Muslims, it is possible that more syndication and webhosted programming could take place.
This shared reality of immigration has moments of conflict, external and internal, which are resolved through interaction with the “foreign” elements. According to the Los Angeles Times, the show was conceived at the Banff Television Festival after the publication of caricatures of Muhammad (peace be upon him) in 2005. Writer Marcia Adair states, “The basic premise was: What would it look like if a Muslim born and raised in Canada became an imam?”
“It’s very unusual, because usually the Imam is imported from overseas and there’s often a cultural disconnect. I thought it would be interesting to have an imam with Canadian cultural sensibilities having to deal with the immigrant men for a change,” said Zarqa Nawaz. Due to easier access to literature, scholars, and transport, the globalised world has made it more likely for the leader of a local Canadian Muslim community to have been born and raised in Canada. Zaib Sheikh, who was cast to play this Canadian imam, believes that the character questions that “are important to ask oneself in this day and age.” He said, “Amaar is a young man learning his place in the world. What’s his role, how will he define himself, how can he make his world a better place?”
Amaar Rashid is first introduced to the audience in an airport. The young imam is on a phone call with his mother and the words “bomb”, “suicide”, and “Allah’s plan” are all taken out of context by a fellow passenger who reports him to the Canadian security apparatus.
“Step away from the bag — you’re not going to paradise today.”
When Amaar is pulled out of the line at the baggage check-in, he is faced with a decidedly post-9/11 line of questioning.
“Muslims around the world are known for their sense of humour,” he says to the police officer when trying to explain that he didn’t mean to alarm anyone.
“I did not know that,” replies the police officer.
“That was another joke,” says Amaar.
When he is released from police custody, the local journalist questions him and frames his arrival as a radicalisation of the local Muslim community. The irony is that the imam sports no beard or clothing generally associated with the Islamic dresscode.
The incident at the Pearson airport is portrayed in a light-hearted fashion in the show itself. But it comes from a very real set of experiences which Muslims in North America have faced. Speaking to BBC, Zaib Sheikh said “I think that’s reflective of the times that we live in. As a Muslim, I myself am involved in moments of deep hilarity in real life when I’m at the checkpoint and someone says ‘random check’ and checks my passport. I look across the line and no random checks are going on for anyone else who is not my skin colour, and doesn’t have my last name of Sheikh. I have to laugh at that.”
In a very public way, Amaar was made to directly communicate with someone in a position of authority on issues he would have to face later on in the show as well: discrimination, marginalization, ignorance, racism, stereotypes, and prejudice. Luckily for him, his law degree and his being a former resident of Toronto are all aspects which added more diversity to his character as an imam and a student of Islam. Even within his personal observation, Amaar sometimes saw the humour caused by the cognitive dissonance. “You can’t just sue people for no reason. Well, all right, you can but I’m not doing that anymore!” he said in an episode of the first season.
“I thought you’d drag us into the modern world. Or at least the 11th century.”
The arrival of a city-dweller to the Canadian prairies is also treated as a huge change; Amaar complains about the lack of hospitality, cappuccino, and a salary for that matter. In a talk aired on BBC Radio 4, Giddens said that it is mistake to only see globalisation from an economic perspective. Back in 1999, Giddens felt that there is a lot more to it. Amaar chooses to stay in the little town despite having received better job offers and receiving no salary from the mosque board (They’re broke). One’s personal decisions is hence an important aspect of the globalised man. Amaar stressed about how we wanted to be only where he was “supposed to be”. In stark contrast is Reverend Thorne who is the new appointment to the church, replacing Revered McGee. Thorne hates the idea of a small town and does everything he can to show his disdain and his desire to go back to a larger city in Canada. He wants to secure a place for himself in a church in Toronto but over the course of the last two seasons he grows to accept Mercy. Over here, the principles of economics are not driving the two men — they have both been exposed to a fast-paced world and they choose to stay in the less developed areas because of the religious duty they feel is weighing down on them.
Mayor Popowicz: “Sarah, you’re supposed to spin the news, not be the news!”
Along with the larger issues of politics in the international realm, there is the politics of race and faith on a very personal level as well. “I’ll pick you a copy of Islam for Dummies on my way home,” promises Rayyan to her mother Sarah; the latter is a convert to Islam and a breakthrough for Muslim representation of mainstream media. Her presence reflects the reality that Islam is not a religion practiced only by people of colour. While Sarah struggles with her faith, her administrative role in running the town along with her mayor, colleague and friend Anne Popowicz is a representation of how professionalism and work ethics are in line with what Sarah believes in. For the Mayor, Sarah’s religion is a “culture” and while she supports the Muslim community of Mercy, her initial approach to the concerns raised by the congregation are to just be politically correct and to also find political support in this niche. Sarah also is very vocal about things she does not understand about Islam and she tries to alter very mundane details to make them more palatable to a non-Muslim perspective. For example, in the “New Year” episode when everyone is recalling their stories, Sarah adds a Bollywood dance to Amaar’s account because his story was “kind of boring.”
“Reverend, I would like to run a mosque out of your parish hall. Would you like to tell Jesus or should I?”
The mosque itself is a character in its own right. Initially, the congregation has to move around from “basement to basement” to find a place to pray collectively five times a day. Then for a larger stretch of the show, the mosque ends up in the parish hall of an Anglican church which rents out the space. Thus, the mosque becomes the meeting point where Christians and Muslims accommodate each other. It can get suffocating at times and the mosque expands from its initial architecture of being a one-room prayer space when the town begins to see the place as a community centre and not a “hotbed of terrorism”. However there is one episode which reveals how a CSIS agent on vacation in Mercy gets the little mosque under surveillance.
“Well here’s my idea: first thing we need is an angry mob…”
Giddens spoke of the in-here phenomena through which he argued that globalisation is an intimate and personal aspect of our lives. It is not just about things “out there” or “out of reach”. In this show, the very core of every character’s life is intimately altered by the changing town, expanding community, and the way the people’s attitudes altered with time. Giddens cited a very Canadian example of the separatist movement in Quebec when talking about how local nationalism springs up as the idea of nation states shifts. In this case however, the show’s premise is that what is Canadian is what binds all these people together. When the Fatima Dinssa, the Nigerian Muslim cafe owner, gets her Canadian citizenship she is accompanied by the radio host Fred Tupper whom she absolutely loathed at the start of the first season. Fred, however, is very amused at the entire prospect and delights at how Fatima gets her first parking ticket as a Canadian and her first response is to yell at the government building behind them. He asks her if that felt good and she replies in the affirmative — this simple scene shows how two polar opposites were on the same page when it came to hating their government.
“I don’t know the first thing to say to her! Or the second, or the fourth!”
“Since the time of my youth, while the Muslim population in North America has increased tremendously, the number of Muslim characters on television has remained negligible. The few that exist are of alien, violent men,” notes researcher Amir Hussain. Little Mosque has addressed that issue since 2007. Even the most visibly aggressive Muslim man on the show, Baber Siddiqi, is shown to care for his daughter Layla as he tries to raise her after a messy divorce. What this does is humanise Baber who is otherwise portrayed as a man so fraught with insecurities and stress that he lashes out on the congregation, Western society, and his own self-concept. For Baber, the concept of no barriers at the mosque is a foreign implant while this is challenged by Rayyan who describes herself as a Muslim feminist. Baber is often seen as thinking of Rayyan as a bad influence for his daughter, nor does he approve very much of Amaar’s less rigid ideas about Islam. But he is very open to helping them get married to each other, to the extent that he volunteers to chaperone them. This soft side of a Muslim father shows that like Yasir, Baber too cares for his family however estranged they are from him. His loneliness stems from his lack of a companion and his decision to take up online matchmaking — even though it is something he considered inappropriate — is one he talks to Layla about. This portrays how access to the internet has helped in the younger generation sharing newer concepts of relationship building and life decisions with the older generation.
“You call that dating? It’s more like a job interview.”
For audiences that were unfamiliar with the idea of what a Muslim wedding looked like, LMOTP showed two Muslim weddings and what led up to them. Even the dissolution of an engagement is shown and Rayyan — the bride in both occasions — is depicted as the woman who braved through one bad experience and still was comfortable with deciding to take up a proposal again. The courtship of two Muslims and how they try to balance what they believe and what they feel is portrayed in a sensitive and gentle manner in the show. Respecting the cultural sensibilities of the bride and the groom, the show did not become preachy at any point. It rather turned the onus to the characters themselves and what they were comfortable with is what the was shown. Even though it could be argued that the script determines what the characters will be like, in this case the audience could tell that the decisions made about marriage were based on a religious ideology. At one point, Amaar decides to leave his position and his congregation because he cannot come to terms with the idea that Rayyan is engaged to another man. Nothing has explicitly been stated about how Amaar and Rayyan feel about each other but the underlying tension and the conflict is one which the Muslims and non-Muslims can both relate to, both on-screen and off. For example, Amaar’s most trusted friend in this ordeal is Reverend McGee who counsels him about how to react to the announcement of the engagement. The idea of romantic love is explored in the storyline by showing how different Muslim characters from diverse parts of the world (Nigeria, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Canada) find it and how the non-Muslim characters react to the notion of love in Islam. The idea of speaking openly about romance, gender issues, and religious rulings on such sensitive topics was explored in the show in a way that it did not make the idea foreign to the Muslim audience watching and the non-Muslim audience who may not know what Muslims in their country were comfortable with talking about or laughing along with. “When I read about how Muslims practiced Islam in the 7th century, it seems there was much more of a naturalistic behaviour between men and women than there is now. The Qur’an and Hadith deal with issues such as menstruation and sex in a natural way. So that’s where I take my cue on how to deal with more sensitive subjects,” said Zarqa Nawaz.
Little Mosque on the Prairie starts with Fred Tupper broadcasting live from the radio to the small populace of Mercy. The series’ finale ends with Fred Tupper saying goodnight but a different note. Fred’s character development has led to a more inclusive broadcasting which no longer needs hate speech to get audiences to tune in. “At the end of the day we’re talking about the oneness of humanity, normalising the ‘other’,” said Mary Darling, the show’s executive producer. With the show coming full circle, it can be said that despite its many issues of having stock characters and poorly argued religious statements, the interaction showed between the two major groups identified on the basis of their faith is what drives the story ahead making each storyline real and lovable.
Originally written on 30th November 2015, for a Global Communications assignment.
