One of the best sitcoms I've seen in recent years is a Canadian import currently streaming on Hulu.com called Little Mosque. This show ran for six seasons in Canada under the title Little Mosque on the Prairie. If you're looking for a genuinely funny show that is simultaneously heartwarming, uplifting and politically incorrect, you should check out the first three seasons of Little Mosque.
The show takes place in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan and centers on the trials and travails of a small community of Muslims trying to maintain their beliefs and traditions in a pluralistic and largely secular society. The writing is funny and the characters, both Muslim and infidel, are engaging and likable.
In the series opener, the Muslim community of Mercy have just taken a major step forward by renting space in the local Anglican church for use as a mosque and by hiring an imam to lead their congregation. The imam, Amaar Rashid, is a young Torontoan who has just left a law practice to enter the clergy, as implausible as that may sound.
One of the community's leaders, Yasir Hamoudi, can best be described as culturally Muslim, having been raised in Lebanon. His parents are thoroughly and devoutly Muslim but Yasir has embraced the Canadian dream, building his own contracting business and marrying a local woman Sarah. Sarah Hamoudi converted to Islam from Anglicanism so that she could marry Yasir but her commitment to her adopted faith seems tenuous at times, even though she repeatedly claims to be a good Muslim. The Hamoudis have an adult daughter, Rayyan, who is a physician. Rayyan considers herself a liberated, progressive feminist yet she is one of the more devout members of the community, wearing a hijab and scrupulously adhering to Muslim traditions governing relations between the sexes.
Baber Siddiqui is a Pakistani immigrant who is one of the most religiously conservative members of the Mosque. He is ready at an instant to offer judgment as to whether a given practice is properly Islamic or not. He is frequently butting heads with the non-Muslim residents of Mercy as well as with those Muslims whose devotion to the faith he finds lacking, Imam Amaar included.
Rounding out the major Muslim characters is Fatima Dinssa, a Nigerian widow who owns and operates a cafe. She leans to the traditionalist side although she is not nearly as strident about it as Baber.
The rector of the local church, and thus the Mosque's landlord, is Father Duncan Magee. At first the Muslims fear that Magee would refuse to rent space in the church if he knew it was to be used as a mosque. Yasir suggests that Magee be told the property is being used as office space for his contracting business. The fact that Yasir's service to the community happens to result in free office space for him is not lost on his neighbors. As it happens, Magee is perfectly happy to rent to the mosque and he and Amaar quickly become friends. As the older and more experienced clergyman, Magee often offers helpful advice to Amaar, such as how to stretch the meager salary of a man of the cloth by visiting nursing homes where they provide complimentary meals from the cafeteria.
Mercy's mayor is Ann Popowicz, a self-absorbed amoral hedonist. She is interested in cultivating good relations with the Muslim community because it means more votes at election time. Sarah Hamoudi is Popowicz's press-secretary and general political advisor.
Local talk-radio host Fred Tupper has found the Muslim community to be a convenient foil for his daily rants attacking what he sees as strange and suspicious practices raising the specter of a terrorist cell in rural Canada.
None of these brief descriptions does justice to its subject. All the characters are multi-layered with their own faults and foibles that either bring them down to earth or round off their rough edges.
For instance, Baber could have easily been written as a priggish foil, a sort of Savanarola in a shalwar kameez. But his personal life deviates markedly from the strict practice of Islam that he advocates. Baber publicly demands that Muslim women display modesty in dress and conduct, but he dotes on his teenage daughter Layla who is apparently Canadian-born and fully assimilated with her peers at school. When she defies Baber, asserting that she will never wear the hijab, he backs down. In one episode he decides to send her to an Islamic boarding school for girls to shield her from the attentions of her male classmates but he is distraught at the thought of her leaving and pounces on the first excuse to rescind his fatwa.
Fred Tupper's baseless conspiracy mongering is played up for ratings on his radio show but his private relationships are more complex. The Muslims of Mercy seem to accept Fred for who he is and manage to get along with him on a one-to-one basis. When Layla Siddiqui got a job as Fred's intern, Fred's concern for her feelings caused him to tone down his anti-Muslim rants and his ratings tanked. Layla sees what is happening and quits so that he can get back to what he does best. She tells him, "[W]hen you get to know people you start to see them as individuals, and it starts a process of understanding, which builds bridges between cultures, which, in your line of work, is a real bad idea." Fred also has a not-so-secret crush on Fatima.
I mentioned the show is politically incorrect. When I first encountered it I feared it would feature a good deal of multi-cultural haranguing as the misunderstood and mistreated Muslims tried to educated the benighted rural (i.e. white) boobs who traffic in every racial and religious stereotype imaginable. But there is none of that. To the extent that there is cultural misunderstanding and conflict between the Muslims and their neighbors, the show finds responsibility on both sides.
When Amaar plans an open house to improve the mosque's relations with the community at large, Baber has trouble getting with the program:
Baber: Brother Amaar, I thought we could teach the infidels a little bit of Arabic.Little Mosque doesn't dwell on the issue of terrorism but it does come up and the writers know how to play it for laughs. In one episode Baber says that he is unable to attend an academic conference in the U.S. because he's on the "no-fly" list. Amaar and Rayyan go with him to the U.S. Consulate to fight the good fight on behalf of a Muslim unjustly slandered as a terrorist. This episode could have been a predictable rant about the arrogant overreaching American government. But the writers of Little Mosque seem more interested in laughs than in politics and the show is better for it.
Amaar: Before the open house on Sunday could you find a better word than "infidels?"
Baber: How about "heathens?"
Amaar: No.
Baber: "Crusaders"
Amaar: No
Baber: "The faithless"
Amaar: Keep trying.
Baber: Okay I'll come up with something.
Political incorrectness is particularly surprising in a Canadian show. Canada doesn't have a First Amendment but it does have a Human Rights Commission which can impose severe penalties for offending the wrong people. Perhaps the writers, being Muslim, have joke telling immunity.
What I realized after a few episodes is that, even though this show is about Muslims, I recognized all these people from church. Like the Muslims of Mercy, Saskatchewan, Christians in the west walk a tightrope between eternal truths and values and a modern culture that seems to reject those concepts.
At the beginning I mentioned I am recommending the first three seasons. Beginning with season four the show's creators introduced the first genuinely unlikable character in the person of Father William Thorne, Magee's replacement as rector of Mercy Anglican. Thorne is close-minded, self-centered, scheming, arrogant, disingenuous and contemptuous, not just of his Muslim tenants but of his own congregants. Thorne aspires to a more prestigious posting than the rustic parish of Mercy, Saskatchewan and despises the unsophisticated flock he is forced to tend. In bringing Thorne into the show the creators destroyed the chemistry that made the show such a joy to watch. I suggest watching seasons four through six only if you're an obsessive compulsive that has to finish the series or if you are genuinely interested in the soap opera plot line that runs through most of the seasons.
