Laughing All the Way to the Mosque

by Zarqa Nawaz

  I was a little taken aback by his forwardness. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling that this senior cleric was so pro-women.

  Mosques without any barriers between men and women were rare, but the Aurora Mosque in Chicago was one of them. A husband and wife team had built it without even a symbolic partition like the knee-high Plexiglas at my mother’s mosque.

  “We knew right away that building with others would mean compromise,” the man told me. “So we decided to do it on our own terms and avoid conflict. And since I had the money, why not?”

  The mosque was beautiful and airy, with peach carpets and a large iron chandelier hanging in the prayer area. I felt that I could relax and just listen to the sermon while the men respectfully shuffled past me. But I noticed that some of the women still sat right at the back and tried to hide behind the pillars.

  “It’s a start,” said the man. “There are people who complain and ask for a barrier, but we tell them that they’ll have to get used to praying without it.”

  After months spent travelling and shooting over 150 hours of footage, and another several months editing it all together, the doc was finally done. I felt ebullient. I knew it couldn’t change the Muslim community, but if it was just a tiny bit influential, all the time would have been worth it.

  Me and the Mosque premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival. Then it screened on Vision TV and finally on CBC Television. Making a documentary that was critical of the community hadn’t made me popular, though. Friends thought my timing was terrible and that I was handing ammunition to the “Muslims are sexist” publicity machine. They felt we should sort out our issues in private. But I felt that the outside world would judge us less harshly if it saw that we too were struggling with gender equality. I held my breath as my community reacted.

  “I like it,” said Blue Scarf, a conservative Muslim woman.

  “Are you going to pray in the main hall?” I asked hopefully.

  “No, I like it here,” she said. “It’s more private.”

  “Not bad,” said Red Beard. “I was very impressed that you got those scholars to talk to you.”

  “So now you understand my mania for wanting to pray in the main prayer hall?”

  “Yes, but I still think it’s better for men and women to be separate.”

  The board of the mosque convened a meeting to discuss the ongoing issue of women’s prayer space and decided to allow women to pray wherever they chose. But while making a decision like that was easy, getting the congregation to accept it was not. The board removed the signs that indicated that the main hall was the men’s. But new ones kept going up. The Battle of the Shower Curtain was replaced by the Battle of the Signs.

  One day a young man from Saudi Arabia approached me.

  “I watched your documentary,” he said. “And I have something to say.”

  “You hated it,” I said, assuming that being from Saudi Arabia would automatically put him on one side.

  “No, I was the one who made the original signs,” he said.

  “The ones that said Women’s Section, Men’s Section?”

  “When I saw my signs in your documentary, I was a little shocked. I had no idea they were making you feel excluded. I’m sorry.”

  “They were very pretty signs,” I said, feeling guilty for judging him. I looked sadly at the ugly computer-generated ones.

  “Thank you. I wanted the women to feel special.”

  I didn’t want to feel special, I thought. I just wanted to feel normal and be able to pray where I wanted without hostile gazes from the men who felt I didn’t belong there.

  Black Beard approached me as I walked into the main prayer hall.

  “Good doc,” he said. “I wish the women would pray here again.”

  “Because you believe in equality?”

  “Because I want to get our bathroom back.”

  It was a start.

  Little Mosque in the City

  “Don’t leave the prayer hall,” said Sami on the phone. I could hear the stress in his voice. Something had gone wrong after Friday prayers. Right after the sermon ended, shouting erupted in the main prayer hall. I looked through the one-way glass and saw agitated men surrounding Sami. It was the first time in my life I was glad to be praying in the women’s section.

  “It’s Little Mosque,” said one of my friends. “Some of the men are angry. They believe the show makes fun of Islam.”

  I felt a sense of horrible dread as I sank down on the carpet and put my head on my knees. Little Mosque had just starting airing on television and the show had come as a big shock to the conservative Muslim community. I’d had no idea people would be so enraged. I called Sami on his cellphone.

  “What are the men saying?” I asked, frightened.

  “They want me to divorce you. They keep yelling ‘Shame, shame.’ Just stay where you are until they leave. We’re going to be fine.” He could read my mind.

  I wondered if I had been naïve when I created the show. I had thought Muslims would be thrilled with a depiction of their community that didn’t feature the usual stereotypes of gun-toting terrorists. But now I was holed up in a mosque waiting for a mob to leave. I started crying, mostly out of disappointment and anger.

  “Don’t cry,” said my friend. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Hadn’t I? My mind went back to when I had first come up with the idea for the show.

  After writing and directing a few short films, I had spent a few years writing a screenplay for a feature film about a Muslim actor who is offered a role as a terrorist about to hijack a plane. He desperately needs the money to pay for an engagement ring for his fiancée. After years of work, I landed a pitch meeting with a prominent producer.

  “This is the single worst pitch I’ve heard in my entire career,” he told me.

  “But it’s a very funny script,” I protested.

  “Do you even remember 9/11?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you can’t be serious about this screenplay,” said the producer, exasperated. “You have written the one script that is not producible in the seeing world. You can’t make a comedy about a Muslim hijacking a plane!”

  “But it’s been five years since 9/11, and no one actually hijacks anything,” I argued. “He’s an actor, not a terrorist.”

  “No one will ever be able to make a comedy about hijacking a plane, ever, EVER,” he said. “You’re funny and talented and one of the most enthusiastic writers I’ve ever met, but this is not happening. Do you hear me?”

  “What about the film The Producers?” I countered. “The play within the film is called Springtime for Hitler. And that film was so popular it became a Broadway play.”

  “You can’t be serious,” he said. “That film was made decades after World War Two and was considered controversial and in poor taste then. Maybe in a hundred years this movie could be made, but by then you and I will both be dead.”

  I went home and sulked. I knew I was crazy for even pitching it, but I had trouble giving up the dream.

  “Sami, I came up with this idea long before 9/11 and now I can’t make it.”

  “Yes, that’s the real tragedy of 9/11,” said Sami sarcastically.

  “My career is over. I’ll never be able to work again,” I said dramatically.

  “Or you could just write another comedy,” he said. “Writers are called writers for a reason. They write.”

  I needed to start a new project, but I was stuck. Then the National Film Board asked me to attend the Banff World Television Festival that year—it wanted to show off its documentary makers.

  “What do writers do at this festival?” I asked my friend Anita, whom I had met at the Women in the Director’s Chair workshop a few years back.

  “They pitch television series.” She sent me some templates.

  This all happened while I was making Me and the Mosque, so fitting Islam into the modern world was fresh in my mind. I wondered how the dynamics of a mos
que would change if the imam was from Canada and supportive of women. I wrote a treatment about a young Toronto lawyer who decides his life in corporate law is sucking his soul. He wants to do something more spiritually fulfilling and reads a wanted ad for an imam job at a tiny, broken-down mosque in Saskatchewan. He decides to accept the job for almost no money, thinking of it as a fresh start in life.

  I set up pitch meetings with various producers in Banff. I decided to give my screenplay a try, just in case.

  “I wrote a screenplay about a Muslim actor who gets a role hijacking a plane—”

  “Pass,” said the producer, cutting me off. “We were told you had a TV series to pitch.”

  I pulled out my treatment about a young man who accepts a job as the imam of a mosque. I had put the mosque in a church because the mosque I had attended as a child was a former church, and the two structures had merged in my consciousness. Stained glass and choir balconies were more Muslim than Christian to me at this point. I was calling it “Pray for Me,” probably because I needed all of the help I could get. As I pitched the idea without any concept of what a pitch should be, a surprising thing happened. People got excited.

  “This is an amazing idea,” said the producer.

  “You’re not talking about the screenplay, are you?”

  “No, that’s a terrible idea. Please stop talking about it.”

  One company in particular, WestWind Pictures, wanted to continue talks with me when I got back to Saskatchewan. I went to their offices and met with Michael Snook, one of the producers. He invited me to work with the team at WestWind to flesh out the series.

  Not long after, I got a call that Anton Leo, the head of comedy for CBC Television, was soliciting pitches from across the country. In the meantime, I’d been editing the documentary and was so focused on finishing that project that I had forgotten much of the original television idea. Michael and I entered the room at the CBC building in Regina, where Anton and his colleague Fred Nicolaidis were sitting. After some small talk, Anton sat back and said, “All right, pitch me.”

  I stared at him blankly. Michael cleared his throat and looked at me. Clearly everyone was expecting me to speak.

  “Okay, there’s a Muslim actor who gets a role as a hijacker—”

  “Not that pitch,” said Michael.

  “Is she serious?” asked Anton.

  “No, she’s just joking. She has an amazing sense of humour. Like anyone would make a comedy about a Muslim hijacker. She’s really here to pitch a series for television, right, Zarqa?”

  I thought I felt a kick under the table.

  “It’s about a dude who leaves Toronto for a job in the prairies,” I said.

  “Does the dude have a job in Toronto?” asked Anton.

  “Yeah, he’s a corporate lawyer and he decides to become an imam,” I said slowly, remembering the premise of the series.

  “What’s an imam?”

  “It’s a name for clergy in a mosque,” I said.

  “So there aren’t requirements for clergy in a mosque? Anyone can do it?”

  “There’s no official certificate from an imam school or anything. As long as they have an extensive knowledge of religion, it’s acceptable. I think you also have to be Muslim.”

  At this point Michael knew I was struggling.

  “She has it all written here,” he said, pushing the treatment forward.

  “Does the imam have a name?” asked Anton.

  “Amaar,” said Michael. “She named him Amaar. Right, Zarqa?”

  “Right,” I replied, realizing that I should have reread the pitch documents I had written six months earlier. “Amaar’s different from what the Muslim community would normally expect an imam to look like: clean-shaven, wears suits …”

  “So this is a classic fish out of water story?” Anton asked.

  “I’m pretty sure there’s no fish in this pitch,” I said, confused.

  “Ha ha, she’s so funny,” replied a nervous Michael. “But yes, it’s a classic fish out of water story. The imam is from Toronto and goes to live in a rural town in Saskatchewan. Zarqa’s actually from Toronto herself, and it’s slightly autobiographical.”

  We left the room. I was worried Michael was disappointed in me.

  “It wasn’t a great pitch, was it?” I asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t stellar, but Anton just put us into development,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, it’s a great concept that even you can’t screw up.”

  Over the next few months, I worked on and off with a team from WestWind and the CBC that included Mary Darling, Clark Donnelly, Susan Flanders-Alexander, Al Rae, Becky Schechter, and David Barlow. They helped turn my initial concept into an actual show and even gave it the perfect title: Little Mosque on the Prairie.

  After our hard work, all eight episodes were done. The CBC asked me to be in Toronto when the show premiered, so I could continue the publicity. I watched the first episode with my parents.

  “What did you think?” I asked my mother, who was knitting a sweater.

  “I think you should be home with your children,” she said.

  “No, I mean the show,” I said. “What do you think about the show?”

  “I thought the hijabs were very pretty,” she said. “Where did you get them?”

  The phone rang a few hours later. My father gave me the phone. It was a reporter.

  “The ratings came in for the first episode,” he said.

  I had been waiting for this. A lot of Canadian shows fail because unlike American broadcasters, Canadian broadcasters don’t have million-dollar advertising budgets. But the American media’s obsession with the show had given us the press that we couldn’t afford and we had gotten the attention we needed.

  “What were they?”

  “2.1 million,” he said.

  “Is that terrible?” I asked. “Like, was the CBC hoping for 20 million?”

  I truly had no idea what the number meant. Ratings were completely new to me and I was thrilled people had watched at all.

  “Put it this way, the last time CBC had ratings that high was when Anne of Green Gables aired.”

  “When was that?”

  “Twenty years ago.”

  “So that’s good, right?”

  “It’s very good,” said the reporter. “Most shows made by the CBC have failed until now. Little Mosque has breathed new life into the network. Think of it this way, it’s as if PBS had discovered CSI.”

  “I don’t think anyone saw this coming,” I said.

  “A hit religious comedy show about Muslims worshipping in a broken-down mosque, within a broken-down church, living in a tiny town in the Canadian Midwest?” said the reporter. “I can guarantee you, no one saw that coming.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not sure if he was complimenting me.

  I flew home to Saskatchewan. Zayn, now six, was waiting for me at the door.

  “I don’t like it when you leave,” he said, hugging me.

  “He’s fine,” said Sami. “But he likes to manipulate you.”

  “I’m not fine,” said Zayn. “I cry in school.”

  “See,” said Sami. “Don’t let him make you feel guilty.”

  Sami picked Zayn up and took him to bed while I grabbed the newspaper. I was interested in the media reaction to the show. I read Margaret Wente, one of my favourite columnists at the Globe and Mail. She wasn’t excited.

  “If there’s an imam on Earth who resembles this one, I will convert to Islam, don the veil, and catch the next plane to Mecca.” I was a little shocked that Margaret didn’t believe that among the billion Muslims on earth there might not be a few good-looking imams. I contemplated sending a picture of Sami to her, but then again, having Margaret in the mosque would be a little unnerving.

  But she wasn’t the only naysayer. Every time I met a Muslim that week, they objected to something they saw in the show.

  “We want a show that projects us as perfect Musl
ims,” said White Scarf.

  “That’s called propaganda,” I said. “And it’s limited to puppet shows and children’s programming.”

  “Do you really think that Muslim women don’t have to cover themselves in front of gay men?” asked Brown Turban.

  “It’s a question worth asking,” I said.

  “Only if you want to ask it in hell,” said Brown Turban.

  “You showed menstrual blood on TV,” said Black Scarf. “I had to cover my child’s eyes.”

  “But Islam is very open about menstruation,” I said. “Why are Muslims squeamish about things that God and his Prophet talked about with sensitivity?”

  “Kissing a man in public?” said Pink Scarf, outraged. “Pinching a man’s butt in the mosque? These are not Islamic behaviours.”

  “But they’re married,” I countered.

  Growing up as a Canadian Muslim meant that I had absorbed a more relaxed attitude about intimacy. Sami and I kissed and cuddled in front of our kids, who viewed it as gross but loving behaviour. But neither my parents nor Sami’s showed physical affection in front of us. They came from a culture that was more reserved. They didn’t even use their first names with each other because it was considered too intimate. The characters on Little Mosque behaved like I would, which, ironically, was closer to the behaviour of the early Muslim community than the one that existed around me now. Week after week, people at my mosque grew more agitated. They were acting as if I had just made Porn on the Prairie. It was becoming clear that I lived in a conservative immigrant community who felt that poking fun at Muslims was tantamount to making fun of Islam. They couldn’t distinguish between the two.

  The swell of anger and indignation came to a head at that fateful Friday prayer. People wanted my head on a platter, and I cowered in the back of the women’s section, wondering how my life had gotten to this sorry state.