Mohammed Ingalls

En ces temps de PJD, c'est agréable de voir des musulmans qui savent rire d’eux-mêmes !
Une nouvelle série canadienne, très drôle, broadcastée par CBC, et qui fait beaucoup parler d’elle.
Voici un article qui lui a été consacré dans le Toronto Journal, repris par le NY Times, et repris par votre humble serviteuse, tout simplement par paresse. Les joies du copier-coller !

‘Little Mosque’ Defuses Hate With Humor

TORONTO, Jan. 15 — When it comes to producing a funny television show or movie in Canada, producers here have a reliable stable of topics: French-English relations, urban-rural dynamics and anything that involves a bumbling politician or the United States. But Islam — something of a third rail of comedy throughout the Western world — did not make the list, which is one reason the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s new situation comedy, “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” is attracting such attention here. “It is a risk doing a sitcom about what can be considered a very touchy subject,” said Kirstine Layfield, executive director of network programming at CBC. But last Tuesday’s series premiere attracted 2.09 million viewers, impressive in a country where an audience of one million is a runaway hit. The CBC had not had a show draw that size audience in a decade, according to the network. The show follows a small group of Muslims in, of all places, a prairie town in Saskatchewan where, in the first episode, the group was trying to establish a mosque in the parish hall of a church. A passer-by, seeing the group praying, rushes to call a “terrorist hot line” to report Muslims praying “just like on CNN,” which touches off a local firestorm. Hoping to avoid making a stir in the town, the group hires a Canadian-born imam from Toronto who quits his father’s law firm to take the job — career suicide, his father thinks. On the way, he is detained in the airport after being overheard on his cellphone saying, “If Dad thinks that’s suicide, so be it,” adding, “This is Allah’s plan for me.” Later, a leader of the Muslim group is seen defending to a local person the plan to turn the parish hall into a mosque. “It’s a pilot project,” he says, leading the man to exclaim wide-eyed, “You’re training pilots?!” A bit hokey, perhaps. But light-hearted moments like these between Muslims and non-Muslims have been few and far between in Canada of late. Last year, 13 Muslim men and five youths were arrested in the Toronto area in connection with a suspected plot to attack several targets in southern Ontario. Their case continues to wind through the courts. In September, an inquiry cleared a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, of terrorism accusations — for which the United States deported him to Syria, where he was tortured — based on faulty intelligence from Canadian authorities. The show’s creator, Zarqa Nawaz, said that she was not trying to bridge all of the cultural gaps, but that she hoped the program could elicit laughs on all sides and perhaps foster a better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. “I want the broader society to look at us as normal, with the same issues and concerns as anyone else,” said Ms. Nawaz, who based the series loosely on her own experiences as a Muslim woman who moved from Toronto to the prairie. “We’re just as much a part of the Canadian fabric as anyone else.” The CBC has committed to eight episodes of the program, and is negotiating with the show’s producers for 13 more in the spring. Despite the initial success, the network is proceeding with caution, having hired a consultant to flag anything in the scripts that could offend audiences. The show has generally been well received by Muslim leaders, who welcome the light touch it brings to issues that are normally debated in numbing seriousness. “Muslims are a bit late in laughing at themselves, but we have to use humor to remedy these divisions, just like any community,” said Mohamed Elmasry, an imam and president of the Canadian Islamic Congress. The show has been criticized for treating too lightly the threat posed by radical Islam and the imams who preach it. The newly hired imam in “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” Amaar Rashid, is clean-shaven, wears tight jeans and has the “ravishing looks of a soap-opera star,” as the columnist Margaret Wente wrote in the Toronto daily newspaper The Globe and Mail. “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,” she added. But what some see as a weakness, others see as a strength. Syed Asad Dean, chairman of the Meadowvale Islamic Center in Mississauga, a western suburb of Toronto, said portraying Muslims as moderate members of the mainstream could have a beneficial effect on young Muslims. “More extreme Muslims are telling our youth that Canada is not interested in our community, so something like this works dead against that type of mentality,” he said. “The youth see it on television and say, hey, they recognize us and they actually made an investment to talk about us and our life in Canada.” The program’s producers have spoken with television executives in the United States, Dubai, Israel, England, Germany and France among others. The first and second episodes have been sent to networks and stations that have expressed an interest. In the United States, only cable stations have responded so far, but CBC officials say they are hoping to pitch the show to the larger networks.

Répliques

Prêche de l'imam
"Desperate housewifes ? Why sould they be desperate when they’re only performing their natural womanly duties ? »

Quiproquo
« You must have tons of information on the influence of Islam in Africa ? »
Yes, from an African prospective. You usually only hear the missionary position.

Extraits