At the time I hadn’t seen so much as a trailer for “Little Mosque”. But it seemed a reasonable enough assumption that nine times out of ten the joke would be on the “irrational” prejudices and drearily provincial ignorance of the Saskatchewan hicks. And sure enough, if you settled down to watch the first episode, it opened up with some stringy stump-toothed redneck stumbling on a bunch of Muslims praying and racing for the telephone:
“Is this the Terrorist Attack Hotline?” he pants. “You want me to hold?”
Well, of course, the local Anglican vicar tries to explain that he’s just rented the parish hall to a harmless group of local Mohammedans. “This is simply a pilot project,” he says reassuringly.
“Pilot?” gasps the redneck. “They’re training pilots?” And off he goes to the talk-radio blowhard who is, naturally, a right-wing hatemonger.
Meanwhile, the mosque’s dishy new imam is waiting to board his flight and yakking into his cell phone about how taking the gig in Mercy, Saskatchewan is going to be career suicide. Another passenger overhears that last word, and the cops pull the guy out of line and give him the third degree: “You lived for over a year in Afghanistan?”
“I was volunteering for a development agency,” says the metrosexual cappuccino-swilling imam, who’s very droll about his predicament: If my story doesn’t hold up, he cracks, “you can deport me to Syria.”
“Hey,” warns the bozo flatfoot sternly, “you do not get to choose which country we deport you to.”
Fair enough. Never mind that, in the real Canada, the talk-radio guy would be off the air and hounded into oblivion by the Saskatchewan Humans Rights Commission; and that, instead of looking like Rick Mercer after 20 minutes on a sunbed and being wry and self-deprecating and Toronto-born, your typical western imam is fiercely bearded, trained in Saudi Arabia and such linguistic dexterity as he has is confined to Arabic; and that airline officials who bounce suspicious Muslims from the flight wind up making public apologies and undergoing sensitivity training; and that, in the event they do bust up a terrorist plot, the Mounties inevitably issue statements saying this in no way reflects on any particular community in our glorious Canadian mosaic, particularly any community beginning with “Is-“ and ending with “-lam”; and that the most prominent Canadians “volunteering” for good works in Afghanistan were the Khadr family, whose pa was sprung from the slammer in Pakistan by Prime Minister Chrétien in order that he could resume his “charity work” and, for his pains, he had to suffer vicious Islamophobic headlines like “Caught In A Muddle: An Arrested Aid Worker Appeals For Chrétien’s Help” (Maclean’s).
Never mind all that. There is after all no more heartwarming tradition in Canadian popular culture – well, okay, unpopular culture: it’s the CBC, after all – than the pleasant frisson induced by the routine portrayal of rural Canadians as halfwit rednecks. One would characterize it as Canadophobic were it not for the fact that the CBC’s enthusiasm for portraying us as a nation of knuckle-dragging sister-shaggers reinforces our smug conviction that we’re the most progressive people on the planet: we celebrate diversity through the ruthless homogeneity of CBC programming; we’re so boundlessly tolerant we tolerate an endless parade of dreary sitcoms and dramas about how intolerant we are. In that sense, the relentlessly cardboard stereotypes are a way of flattering the audience. In the second episode of “Little Mosque”, for example, the non-Muslim gals of Mercy, Sask stage a protest against the mosque: every single infidel woman in the march is large and plain and simple-minded. The only white folks who aren’t condescended to are the convert wife of the Muslim patriarch and the impeccably ecumenical Anglican minister (although his church, unlike the mosque, is dying).
But in this cross-cultural gagfest what of the jokes on the other side? Well, these are the cuddliest Muslims you’ve ever met. They’re not just moderate Muslims, they’re moderately funny! Not screamingly funny like, say, Omar Brooks, the British Muslim comic whose boffo Islamostand-up routine was reported in The Times of London last year:
At one point he announces dramatically that the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center ‘changed many people’s lives’. After a pause, he brings the house down by adding: ‘Especially those inside.’
He didn’t bring the house down literally. He leaves that to Mohammed Atta. By contrast, “Little Mosque”’s creator, Zarqa Nawaz, opts for “Ozzie And Harriet” in a chador. The nearest thing to an Islamist firebreathing mullah in the cast warns sternly about how Canadian society lures Muslims into decadent ways: “Wine gums. Rye bread. Liquor-ish. Western traps designed to seduce Muslims to drink alcohol… The enemy,” he warns, “is in the kitchen.”
At which point the Muslim women eavesdropping outside joke to each other that, if the enemy’s in the kitchen, perhaps he could do the washing up. Boy, I loved that gag when Samantha did it to Darren on the second season of “Bewitched”, and it’s just as funny in a hijab. This is the point, of course: the Muslims on the show are scaled down, from a global security threat to warm low-key domesticity, to all the same generation-gap and battle-of-the-sexes japes as every other hi-honey-I’m-home sitcom. Miss Nawaz is certainly capable of a sharp line – “‘Good-looking terrorist’? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” (surely more like a redundancy, considering the number of western women who find Osama dishy). But for the most part she holds off: for a cross-cultural comedy, it’s striking that both groups operate to white stereotypes – it’s just that the Muslims have been handed the blandly benign stereotypes of “Life With Father”. The synopses of upcoming episodes – “Yasir’s overbearing mother wants him to try something new – a second wife”, “Rayyan and her mother end up on opposite sides of the fence over co-ed swimming” – suggest the familiar issue-of-the-week format of long forgotten, worthily controversial sitcoms like “Maude”, the ones that won all the awards and are never in reruns. But here controversies are painless: when gender-segregating barriers are proposed for the mosque, the savvy quasi-feminist women have no problem running rings round the menfolk; the stern dad determined to put his adolescent daughter into her veil crumples without a fight. “Next week confusion abounds when Rayyan has a pronounced bulge in her belly and her brother arranges an honour killing. But it turns out she’s just hiding the latest huge edition of The Oxford Anthology of Islamofeminist Writing!”
I would love to see a really great Muslim sitcom. After all, one of the worst forms of discrimination is to exclude someone from the joke. Gags are one of the great pillars of a common culture, which is why bicultural societies tend toward the humourless: see Belgium. (Before you call in a hate crime to the Council on Belgo-Canadian Relations, I should point out I’m semi-Flemish.) You don’t have to look hard to find comedy in the Muslim world. In a debate at Trinity College, Dublin recently, the aforementioned Omar Brooks said that Mohammed’s message to non-believers was: “I come to slaughter all of you.” He meant it, but come on, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter. Warming to his theme, he said, “We are the Muslims. We drink the blood of the enemy, and we can face them anywhere.”