TV Review: Little Mosque on the Prairie

Although the current state at the cabin at Lake Tahoe is a dearth of channels, my TV-watching habits for series (as well as webcomic-reading) can be described as short-term addiction. This tendency also appears when I read books in a series. I watch a lot of episodes at once, and then lose interest; if it is sufficiently compelling, I may return. So it has been with the CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie. I watched Season 1 a while ago, and then lost interest, but I have been watching many episodes recently, and now have reached another lull.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, I could just post the Wikipedia link. That, however, would be lazy. The series' viewpoint character is a Toronto lawyer who decides to become an imam (more like a rabbi than a priest) for the Muslim community of the small western Canadian town of Mercy. Presumably the creator of the series used this (standard literary) structure in order that she could have an outsider thrust into the midst of key religious disputes. One must admit it makes more sens than the ordinary child who becomes the key to the salvation of the universe. The Muslim and non-Muslim characters span the entire political range, although it is true that the show privileges the Muslim characters. I can forgive this imbalance, since the other movie and TV roles for Muslim characters and actors of Middle Eastern descent are very frequently terrorists.

It's a very Canadian show, eschewing the Manichaean dichotomy of culture warriors and favoring the portrayal of individuals with personal motivations for faith or lack thereof. Each week there is a crisis that pits at least one character's Islamic beliefs or cultural tendencies from the Islamic part of the world against "western" traditions. The first season is especially interesting in that regard, since specific concepts needed to be introduced; the third season is closer to a soap opera, if soap operas were rigidly episodic and chaste to the point of no kissing. The westernization of the Muslim characters has angered many Muslim watchers, but I doubt the show would be able to spread its message of goodwill and ecumenical harmony if it showed the most rigid segments of the Muslim population.

I'm certainly not a follower of the Prophet, and perhaps I think this way because my formative political experience was the fall of the Berlin Wall rather than 9/11 or the Cold War, but this series does a good job of introducing Islam in a setting which will not frighten westerners.