Abstract
Little Mosque on the Prairie, a television comedy series featuring Muslim characters and a Muslim minority community on the Canadian prairies, was a novel and groundbreaking undertaking when it was launched in 2007. Appearing in the context of a growing Canadian Muslim population, and of ambivalent attitudes towards Muslims among Canadians in general, the series is here analyzed as a cultural intervention into the contested field of Canadian Muslim identities. First, however, the scene is set by evoking Lessing’s interfaith parable of the three rings, and by searching through past Muslim-Christian-Jewish coexistence in al Andalus, or Muslim Spain, for categories of religio-cultural interaction. Second, the Canadian context of increasing religious diversity and ambivalent attitudes vis-à-vis Muslims is explored. Selected episodes form the first two seasons of Little Mosque on the Prairie are then analyzed to reveal its dynamic intervention in the Canadian cultural imaginary by confounding simple “Muslim versus Canadian” binaries, normalizing visible Canadian Muslim identities, de-homogenizing and circumscribing Canadian Muslim-ness, and longing for a utopic interfaith convivencia. In the end, it is argued that Little Mosque on the Prairie attempts to show how Canadian Muslims can be authentic, not despite, but because of having to interact with a wider non-Muslim context.
The text of this article was originally delivered orally on October 19 and 21, 2009 in Camrose and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, as part of the Augustana Distinguished Lecture series sponsored by the Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life at the University of Alberta, and was issued as part of a booklet, On the Way to Muslim-Christian Understanding, by the Chester Ronning Centre in 2010. My thanks to the director of the Chester Ronning Centre, David J. Goa, for permission to reuse this material for this edited and updated version.
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Notes
- 1.
The ire of Pastor Goeze and other Christian leaders had been provoked when Lessing published posthumous fragments of the work of the radical enlightenment biblical critic H.S. Reimarus. Lessing responded with a series of virulent polemical pamphlets, Anti-Goeze, The duke of Brunswick intervened by banning any further of these publications. Lessing thus took the more indirect artistic route of writing the play Nathan the Wise in order to continue his argument for religious tolerance against the strictures of rigid religious dogmatism. Some reviewers of the play decried the portrayal of a Jew as the hero, and the play was condemned by government censors and banned by the Catholic authorities who saw it as an attack on the church. Not surprisingly, much later the play was also banned by the Nazis.
- 2.
Menocal recognizes that the Muslim institution of dhimma, a pact or covenant between ruling Muslims and other communities of the Book, could be enacted in either genuinely tolerant or culturally repressive arrangements. She argues that the Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus set a pattern for a relatively liberal and open enactment of dhimma (2002:72–73).
- 3.
These examples are selected from Menocal 2002.
- 4.
According to David Nirenberg’s study of Jews and Muslims in the Christian kingdom of Aragon, “not only were ritualized outbursts of inter-communal violence a normal and expected part of coexistence, but also they made the continued toleration for non-Christian minorities possible by delineating their place within the majority society” (Soifer 2009:22).
- 5.
This is the argument of Chris Lowney’s A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (2005) (Wolf 2009:79–80).
- 6.
According to the 2001 census, over three quarters of Canadians still identify themselves as Christians (Religions in Canada 2003). Unfortunately, this was the last year that the Canadian census asked about religious affiliation; this question was dropped for the 2011 census. It is now included only on the voluntary National Household Survey, sent to about a third of Canadian households; results from the question about religious affiliation in the 2011 National Household Survey will not be released until later in 2013.
- 7.
Muslims constitute about 2 % of the Canadian population according to the 2001 census, and are the fastest growing religious group in Canada. Some 6 % of Canadians claim adherence to a non-Christian religion, while over 16 % claim no religious affiliation at all (Religions in Canada 2003). According to statistical projections, Muslims will constitute over 7 % of the Canadian population by 2031, as part of the projected 15 % of Canadians claiming adherence to non-Christian religions by this time; those claiming no religion are projected at 20 % of the Canadian population by 2031 (Malenfant et al. 2010:25).
- 8.
Those who identified religion as important to their identity or regularly attended religious services were more likely to feel uncomfortable with a close relative marrying a Muslim (42 %, 42 %) or an atheist (51 %, 47 %), while those who responded that religion and religious observances were not important to them were more likely to feel discomfort at the thought of a close relative marrying a Christian fundamentalist (39 %, 41 %) (Parkin and Mendelsohn 2003:17).
- 9.
For example, the sample size was 2,000 in the 2003 poll, which was conducted by telephone interviews, while the sample size was only 1,007 in the 2009 poll, which took place on-line.
- 10.
For example, Douglas Todd published a descriptive objective report in his blog The Search on a public prayer by some 1,000 Muslims in downtown Vancouver on August 14, 2009b. Some of the comments the readers attached to his report are quite revealing of fairly negative views towards Muslims. For example: “Let’s round ‘em up and burn them at the stake, to save ourselves!” or “Muslims will occupy Canada soon. This is the first step. Canadians need to think about kicking terrorists out before it’s too late. It’s more likely too late because muslims already every where [sic] in Canada”.
- 11.
- 12.
Ramji (2003) traces the negative portrayal of Muslims in Hollywood films.
- 13.
The first two seasons (January–March, 2007, and October 2007–March, 2008) garnered the highest ratings for the series, and also contain the most interesting episodes of the show for the analysis in this article. Ratings in subsequent seasons declined sharply to one fifth of the original audience.
- 14.
The most commonly shared Canadian cultural space is amateur sports (Habacon 2008:153).
- 15.
Bakht (2008) describes these incidents, which involved soccer and taekwondo competitions. She sees in them a transformation of the stereotypical discourse about the Muslim veil in western society from the need to protect veiled Muslim women from their oppressive men/culture/religion into the need to protect them from the physical dangers of the veil itself (contrary to any hard evidence that the wearing of hijab has physically endangered any player).
- 16.
I use the notion of a cultural imagination in the sense of the French historiographical notion of the imaginaire, a set of interwoven meanings and representations occupying an intermediary role between societal mentalities/individual subjectivities, and actual material circumstances.
- 17.
The term “imbrication” can be used to describe such a close overlapping so as to form an intricate regular pattern, The elements of the pattern are not fixed but so closely conjoined that the pattern would otherwise not exist.
- 18.
Note, however, that the other major public space in which the series takes place is Fatima’s café, perhaps a metaphor for the public commons in which Muslims and non-Muslims alike can freely mix and meet.
- 19.
“My biggest hope is it is treated as a comedy, like any other comedy… a comedy that people of all ages, faiths, and backgrounds watch… We want them to watch because it’s a funny, entertaining show that just happens to have Muslims in it. We hope the viewers will be able to relate to the characters and the situations because they’re all very universal” (quoted in DeDekker 2007).
- 20.
Of course, in the Anglican church, a Bishop would likely be in this role. The writers of the series regularly make such gaffes, probably due to a lack of real familiarity with the communities that they are writing about. These slips, in my opinion, add to the displacing humour of the series.
- 21.
The series thus excludes Muslims who energetically reject the western society within which they are living, understanding it through a paradigm of resistance. Muslims who understand their situation through the other three paradigms identified by Mattson (2003) among Muslim immigrants – embrace, selective engagement, and engagement without compromise – would be included. It is unclear whether Little Mosque on the Prairie would include the Salafists that Ramji (2008) identified as one of the categories of Canadian Muslim youth in its construction of Canadian Muslim identities. This group, Ramji discovered, while highly critical of aspects of Canadian society, still feels at home in Canada.
- 22.
Playing in the background of these interfaith epiphanies is Cat Stevens singing “Peace Train”, itself a multi-layered invocation of the complexity of religious identities and inter-religious interaction. Cat Stevens, as is well known, converted to Islam, changed his name to Yusuf Islam, and shunned his music entirely for some time, until recently coming full circle back to singing and recording under the name Yusuf.
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Greifenhagen, F.V. (2013). “Little Mosque on the Prairie” and Modern Convivencia: An Intervention into Canadian Muslim Identities. In: Hoffmann, T., Larsson, G. (eds) Muslims and the New Information and Communication Technologies. Muslims in Global Societies Series, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7247-2_8
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