JEDDAH, 8 December 2006 — Fatima goes to her Canadian public school swimming class only to discover, to her horror, that a man has replaced her woman swimming coach. Desperate to cover her hair before he approaches, she grabs a towel for an improvised hijab. The next time you see her she’s in a swimsuit that covers everything except her face, hands, and feet.
“Fatima comes out dressed in the Haz-Mat Islamic swimsuit,” says the notes on a script, jokingly referring to the hazardous-materials uniforms that people wear when they’re cleaning up toxic waste or nuclear spills.
Fatima is a fictional character, a young teenage girl living as a Muslim in Canada. She’s in a new sitcom titled “Little Mosque on the Prairie”, which attempts to cast the lighter and funnier side of being a North American Muslim.
The New York Times reported yesterday that the new program, co-created by Zarqa Nawaz, 39, herself a Canadian Muslim of Pakistani immigrant parents, has hit the airwaves of the Great White North with an aim at addressing some contemporary issues facing contemporary Muslims living in a contemporary world virtually free of the type of radical fundamentalism prevalent elsewhere.
In this world, Muslims face more banal challenges, such as what to do when your children want to dress up for Halloween (in one episode of the program, characters addresses how to turn Halloween into “Halal-oween”), or what to do when the woman coach of your all-girls swim class is replaced by a gay man. One scene has a teenage girl wearing an outfit that shows her navel; her immigrant father shakes his head in disapproval and says to her: “You look like a Protestant.”
“Dad, you mean a prostitute?” she replies.
“No,” he says. “A Protestant.”
According to the Times report, initial audience screening of the program shows younger native-born Canadian Muslims more likely to laugh at the show while their more traditional parents are more skeptical.
The use of humor to diffuse cultural clashes is not a new one in North America. In the 20th Century, the Italians and Jews in the United States developed their own distinct brands of humor that helped them show to society a humorous take of their customs and habits that the larger population at the time thought peculiar. Today Italian-Americans and Jewish-Americans are considered by society to be as “American” as any others.
“Nobody has done a comedy about Muslims before, so they are not sure how to take it,” Nawaz told the New York Times. “Some non-Muslims wonder, ‘Are we allowed to laugh?’”