EDITORIAL: Expats: learning to laugh at themselves

[Neo]

Friday, January 19, 2007

EDITORIAL: Expats: learning to laugh at themselves

The Muslims of Canada have got together with a Canadian TV channel to produce a hilarious comedy on what happens to Muslims in Canada, and, by extension, in all countries in the West. The humour is apparently at the cost of the non-Muslim Canadians who can’t make heads or tail of what the Canadian Muslims are up to, but most importantly, it is also a spoof on the expats who refuse to integrate and live a style of life that is not to be found ‘back home’. The TV series has caught on and might serve to demystify the cult of Muslim ghetto-isation and eventually find acceptance for them among the host community. Hopefully, the comedy will also puncture the high-seriousness artificially pumped into the expats by their extremely dated clergy.

The series called ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’ tells the story of a small group of Muslims freshly moved to a prairie town in Saskatchewan, where one of the first things they do is build a mosque which they can manage only by renting space inside a chapel. The comedy is full of funny lines and is typical slapstick in the western tradition. In the past, the BBC has done take-offs on the lifestyle of the Asians to great effect, but Canada’s venture focuses on the Muslims, and needless to say, on their religious preoccupations. Since the Muslims’ defensiveness in alien environments has reduced them to cycles of prayers and strict adherence to what they think is shariah, this effort could lead to positive results.

Canada, like the United Kingdom, has suffered at the hands of Muslim imams or leaders of prayers in its mosques. Some time ago, some Canadian reporters secretly visited 15 of nearly 50 mosques in the Greater Toronto Area, to hear one cleric say, ‘Everyone must do what they can to help their brothers fight the struggle against infidels’. At one mosque the namazis called for a khilafat in Canada with an army ‘to rid the world of infidels once and for all’. The mosque imams warned their worshippers to stay away from western institutions. One said, ‘Evil Western values and haram (sin) surrounds Muslim children in Toronto’. All of them asked the followers to work towards converting Canada into an Islamic state rather than accept its secular values.

Unfortunately, jihad continues to be a passion of the expatriate Muslim. This passion has its birth in the question of identity, an introversion compelled by the conditions of life in alien societies. In his own country the Muslim is habituated to feeling secure or insecure on the basis of his identification with the mythical construct of the umma. But this causes alienation with the nation-state that insists on a nationalism based on its self-interest. Therefore the Muslim carries abroad a particular dislike of his ‘national’ identity and reconstructs a new identity based on the idea of the transnational umma, a function not encouraged by the nation-state but easily executed in the alien West with full citizenship rights. Thus when you ask the question “who are you?” the answer is likely to be “I am a Muslim” rather than just “I am a Canadian”, which is what most non-Muslim Canadians would say.

The new ‘synthetic’ Muslim identity in the West is assisted by the policy of multiculturalism — that is, allowing ‘integration’ while remaining ‘separate’ without any obligation to imbibe any aspect of Western life and culture. In Western Europe and the United Kingdom, the Muslims have been allowed to attain a hard-line Islamic identity not even known ‘back home’. In the case of Pakistani expatriates, some pride is experienced by them in becoming more distinctly Muslim than the Muslims of Pakistan. Indeed, one often hears rebuke from the returnees on the state of ‘non-observance’ back home even though Pakistan has made its own tortuous journey towards religiosity.

The future of expatriate Islam will depend on how the West tackles the problems of its empowerment through equality of citizenship. For the moment, new, stricter laws are being enacted at the cost of civil liberties to allow the state to carry out an intrusive scrutiny of the mode of life of the Muslims. Much of the intensity of the expatriate Muslim reaction springs from the individual’s awareness of his rights — rights which are ironically enough not available in indigenous Muslim societies. This intensity is bound to subside over time. Another factor that will contribute to the lowering of the temperature of Muslim ‘revival’ is the transformation of jihad into sectarianism which will not be appreciated by ordinary, decent Muslims.

The first step is not to take one’s piety so seriously. There is nothing like humour to bring back balance that has been lost through a relentless navel-gazing of the pious. Pakistani TV channels too should imbibe this expat feat of creativity and give time-off to the bearded man stuck in the screens of people’s TV sets since the days of General Zia-ul Haq. *

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\01\19\story_19-1-2007_pg3_1