Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Canadian TV serial on Muslims called racist and bigoted

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: A comedy about a Muslim family in a small Canadian town, which is now being shown on Canadian TV, has been castigated as racist and bigoted by two liberal Muslim community leaders.

In an article in Toronto Sun, Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hasan wrote that ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’, as the serial is called, presented a “completely false picture of the Muslim community”, and accused the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) of validating the image painted by Islamist groups that Muslim lives revolved around mosques and nothing else.

They wrote, “After watching the fourth episode of Little Mosque, we question the motives of the writer, producers and directors of the show for focusing singularly on the most conservative segments of the Muslim community. Although the characters are meant to reflect the diversity of Muslim society, a closer examination reveals the show is not about liberal or progressive Muslims competing with conservatives. Rather, the writer has created a false dichotomy of ‘conservative’ Muslims versus ‘ultra-conservative’ Muslims; the former being disingenuously passed on as feminist and progressive. Muslims who do not pay homage to their Imams – the liberal, secular or progressive segments of the community – are conspicuous by their complete absence from the Little Mosque narrative.”

Fatah and Hasan said that the writer, Zarqa Nawaz, had played a deft hand in attempting to sanitise what really went on in the typical Canadian mosque. “The hijacking of our religion, Islam, by politicised clerics affiliated with Saudi Arabia or Iran, finds no resonance in the sitcom. Depicting recent immigrants as clumsy buffoons while portraying their children as sophisticated and savvy yuppies is a reflection of the writer’s own complexes, not reality. Going on a sex strike and then debating its conclusion inside a mosque? Who are CBC and Nawaz kidding? Lawyers giving up Toronto law practices to become Prairie imams? Fat chance.”

The two community leaders, known for their progressive views, wrote that all of the depictions pointed to an Islamist agenda that sought to justify inequities that pervaded Muslim communities under the pretext of progress.

They said that orthodox Islam was presented as the only authentic belief system that was in consonance with progress. “While the Muslim characters are fake, fellow non-Muslim Canadians, who have shown tremendous generosity in embracing people of different cultures and religions, are continually and unfairly portrayed as paranoid bigots. What has raised eyebrows about the show among Muslims is that such distortion may be deliberate in order to exaggerate the incidence of racism and bigotry against Muslims in Canada, to foster the culture of victim-hood and accentuate the chasm between Muslims and non-Muslims in Canada. If CBC was sincerely trying to be inclusive in bringing Canada’s Muslims into the picture, we suggest they include Muslim characters in their regular sitcoms or shows, not make a farce of our community and present it as an act of generosity.”

Courtesy DailyTimes.com.pk

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