Fundamentalism and Religiosity:  The Little Mosque on the Prairie

The Little Mosque on the Prairie is a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation comedy about Muslims establishing a mosque in a small Saskatchewan community.   Its predictable slant is that Muslims are just plain folks, not fundamentalists but human beings, yet constantly suspected of terrorist leanings.   The Muslim characters are for the most part appealing yet not improbable.    The script fairly shouts that Muslims are cheerful and scrappy; that they intermarry with white people; that they are flawed but basically decent and honest; that they are with-it, and use sprightly slang like ‘you suck at this’.   The reactions to the show are equally predictable:   it stereotypes the white people; it's too politically correct; it's not politically correct enough.

Something big is missing from this picture, and it's not the 72 virgins, or raisins as the case may be, or stoning blasphemers.   While exorcising the fundamentalist bogeyman, the well-intentioned portrayals of Islam leave unrepresented a large group of Muslims - the 'bad' ones, the ones who are, by any religious standards, a disgrace.   Fundamentalism has ceded the field, not to a balanced picture of Muslims, but to a religiosity that today engulfs virtually all discussions of all religions, even if the participants in the discussion aren't religious themselves.

What happened long ago to 'Jewish' is happening more and more to 'Muslim' and 'Christian'.   These terms have acquired an ethnic as well as a religious connotation, especially in certain circumstances.    When it comes to Muslims, even among people with enough upstairs to understand that some Arabs aren't Muslim, and some Muslims aren't Arabs, there certainly is much talk about a real or imagined Muslim *culture*.  This talk concerns customs about the sexes, holiday observances, political beliefs, and a good deal else that isn't straightforwardly religious, including Samuel Huntington's famous 'clash of civilizations'.   In the case of Christians, when one speaks of Syrian or Lebanese or Pakistani Christians, there is a tendency to treat these groupings as the 'communities' of multiculturalism, that is, once again, as an ethnic group.  When taken in this now very common quasi-ethnic sense, all sorts of Jews, Muslims and Christians - atheists who maintain a family connection to their faith, or to the ethnicity that has taken the place of faith, agnostics, sometime believers, anti-institutional believers - get short shrift.

To me, for example:   I am Jewish and take grave offence if anyone suggests otherwise.  I have never believed in God.   I did do two years of 'Hebrew school', out of curiosity and a certain vague ethnic loyalty.  I was not Bar Mitzvah and have nothing but contempt for the self-important pedants who will say:  oh, then you're not a Jew.   I attended synagogue a few times.   I never go any more, ever.

My case may be extreme.   But when it is said that 'Jews' keep kosher, observe Yom Kippur, worship in synagogues, wear skullcaps and so on, this leaves out a huge number of Jewish people - people who consider themselves Jewish, whom a census would be count as Jewish, who would qualify as Jewish under Israel's law of return, and who would have been killed for being Jewish by the Nazis.   Many of these people, even if, like me, they never engage in any religious observance, have a genuine affiliation with the Jewish religion.   Others see Jewishness as secular and cultural; they will identify themselves as Jewish purely for family or social or political reasons.   Quite a few others, frankly, don't give a shit, even if they reflexively check off their religion as 'Jewish' on government forms.  Yet when we read about what 'the Jewish community' or 'the Jews' want or believe in or do, all these people apparently vanish from the face of the earth.  Undoubtedly something similar can be said of millions of people who, in all sorts of contexts, would be identified as Christian.

I personally know Muslims - people who regard themselves and are regarded as Muslims - who are like the Jews and Christians described above.   Some of the greatest 'Muslims' (in this sense) of modern times fit the same description, men like Ali Jinnah and Kemal Ataturk, whom many religious Muslims call an atheist.   Maybe he was, but, when addressing the Turkish Parliament in 1924, he said that

"There is a need to separate Islam from its traditional place in politics and to elevate it in its appropriate place. This is necessary for both the nation’s worldly and spiritual happiness. We have to urgently and definitively relieve our sacred and holy beliefs and values from the dark and uncertain stage of political greed and of politics. This is the only way to elevate the Muslim religion."

It may be important to add that most of these 'bad' Muslims are not at all like the Uncle Toms who rant about the sickness of Islam and suck up to Zionism.  They share no agenda, not even secularism or reform.   Just as they are not like the Uncle Toms, so they are unlike the terminally sanitized 'good Muslims' of Little Mosque on the Prairie.   Yet the show's all-too-obvious goal of encouraging tolerance would have been well served had we been shown, not just the veiled Muslims who can say "you suck at this", but the ones who get drunk, who dress like skanks, who dig into bacon and eggs before sundown during Ramadan, and who couldn't care less, as the CBC's Muslims do, when Ramadan begins and ends.    The show's 'ordinary', engaging Muslims may not blow up airliners, but they certainly would cramp the style of many Canadians, including many Canadian Muslims.   Wouldn't it foster tolerance and understanding to be told that the guy drinking double scotches next to you is a Muslim too, and not some guilty hypocrite sneaking out on the town?

If these 'bad' Muslims have fallen right off the map, it's not because of some fundamentalist plot, nor is it because of anything to do with Islam.  It has to do with North American religiosity, and that's what undermines Little Mosque on the Prairie.   In the name of tolerance, we now refuse even to consider that religious piety is not, after all, in the blood of everyone we stick into quasi-religious cubbyholes.   If you're a 'bad' Jew or Muslim, you're invisible.  You'll still have religion shoved down your throat, though:  every 'holiday season' you'll have to fend off all the walking-on-eggs well-wishers determined to smother you with your own alleged faith.   This sort of multiculturalism has a bit too much of The Moral Majority for my taste.