Little Mosque on the Prairie and Religious Intolerance

For the past four years I've come to really enjoy the Canadian series "Little Mosque On The Prairie".

I admit when I first heard the title, I rolled my eyes, and assumed it was .... well, to be honest, I don't know what I thought it was, but the idea of a satirical, perhaps inappropriate slam against Muslims came to mind.

About halfway through the 1st season, I finally succumbed to the generally positive reviews, and managed to get a the episodes I had missed. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that I almost instantly fell in love with this show.

I suppose it's hard to really express why to people who have not seen it. Here in the United States, we tend to not have comedy shows that are not full of innuendo and racy behavior and dialogue. And I actually LIKE the innuendo and racy stuff, but I guess there's a time and place for everything, and this show is a complete 180 from that. It wasn't something I was really expecting, and I was really happy with how it plays out.

The show involves a Muslim community that lives in the small fictional town of Mercy, in Saskatchewan Canada. It attacks the obvious points of "fish out of water", showing the reactions by the nearly all white town of Mercy to their new neighbors, but also hits on the unfortunately not so obvious to many people, which is that the Muslim people are just like everyone else.

They go to school, they go to work, they go on vacations with their families, they simply have a different faith. Unfortunately there's too many people who ignore all the former, and focus on the latter.

This show, though, doesn't really hammer you over the head with the political or religious subject matter, although it does address various of these types of subjects.

The thing I like the most about this show, is that it's kind of a sweet innocent type show. As I said, it doesn't overdo the political or religious angles, presenting instead, a family type show dealing with community, and the tolerance and acceptance of other people's beliefs.

However, the current season (the fourth season finale airs next week) has been a bit of a departure, with the addition of a new character, and the removal of a previous beloved character.

The character of Rev. Magee, who ran the Evangelical church and allowed the Muslims to rent the back half of his church for their Mosque, when no one else in town would, was always a very positive and sweet character, if a bit simple. This season began though with him gone with very little reference, and in his place was a new Rev Thorne, who is pretty much the antithesis of Magee.



He is a horrible bigot and spouts racist stereotypes about the Muslim faith, nonstop. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the man has not had one single redeeming moment in the previous 16 episodes. Usually in shows, a person who is a bad guy or does reprehensible things, the show eventually tries to make him somehow likeable or at least provide some insight into why he feels that way.

Thorne has none of that. He continues to do everything he can to get the Muslims out of the church, going so far as to stir up dissension, lie and even steal (he stole a sermon from Amaar, the Muslim Imam) and fobbed it off as his own, and then went out of his way to make Amaar seem to be an intolerant racist (a bit of projection, I must say).

Now all this would be interesting, if there was some bit of balance, but there's not. Thorne rarely if ever has his comeuppance, and I can only recall twice that he's ever been shown up, once when getting knocked out in a boxing match (which he then used to smear the Muslims as violent and barbaric) and then when he went off on a racist rant about an African American Jesus statue, only to be embarassed when the priest he thought was going to be offended by it, turned out to be Black himself.

Everytime Thorne succeeds in turning the town against Amaar and the other Muslims, culminating in him succeeding in getting Amaar fired, and then the entire Muslims thrown out of their Mosque.

At this point, there's many fans who have gone online to vent about the character, and how they have stopped watching the show. I'm not there yet, but it's close. As I said, if there was some balance to Thorne's vile repugnant behavior, that'd be something, at least, but there's not. He almost always comes out on top, and there's very little of that "Thorne got his" retribution.

I'm not sure if Brandon Firla (who plays Thorne) will be back or not, but I have a feeling that until he's gone, or at least until they learn to balance the show out, and remove so much of the nasty rhetoric, that the show will not recover. Print this post