Zarqa Nawaz, the creator and driving force behind the production company Fundamentalist Films (“putting the ‘fun’ back in fundamentalist”) accidentally took the world by storm when she created the Canadian sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, in 2007. To Nawaz, who spoke and screened an episode of her show in the Kennedy Auditorium on April 28 as part of the Humanities Forum, comedy is all about finding something funny to say that nobody has ever said before. Nawaz struck sitcom gold with Little Mosque on the Prairie, a show that beat the odds and became an international success, against everybody’s expectations.
Part of the reason why Little Mosque’s success is so surprising is that Canada does not have a history of successful sitcoms. The Canadian sitcom industry is almost nonexistent, as Canadian viewers generally have tended towards watching popular American programming. A normal lifespan for a Canadian sitcom, explained Nawaz, is two or three episodes—enough time for networks to cancel shows in lieu of poor ratings.
Little Mosque tells the story of a small Muslim community in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Nawaz, a Canadian-born Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, likes to describe Little Mosque as a comedy about how Muslims function in the real world. The only Muslims people ever see on television, she said, are fundamentalist extremists who represent only the tiniest percentage of the Muslim community. Little Mosque on the Prairie plays with aspects of Muslim life that Nawaz believes are inherently funny. In short, it is a show about the struggles of a community that is scared of certain aspects of western culture.
Nawaz credits Little Mosque’s success to the free exposure it received from the American media. When major news outlets first heard of its filming, they assumed that Little Mosque would be wildly controversial, mostly because American sitcoms shy away from potentially offensive religious overtones. Where previous Canadian sitcoms had failed to excite audiences, the United States was providing Little Mosque with millions of dollars worth of public exposure before it was even on the air. The show premiered to two million viewers, an unprecedented number in a country that only has 30 million citizens.
Though an expected controversy is what gave the sitcom a boost into the public eye, the backlash from the Muslim community was minimal because Nawaz, a Muslim herself, is careful to be respectful of faith. The show has managed to keep attracting viewers, both domestically and internationally, because it is really funny. The show is a cultural phenomenon both in that it is the only comedy on television about Muslims and in that it revitalized an all-but-defunct industry.
