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Zarqa Nawaz is a very funny person. This should not surprise anyone who knows that she is the creator of the Canadian comedy series, Little Mosque on the Prairie. She is also the author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, a memoir that begins with her experience as a Muslim girl growing up in Brampton Ontario.
Nawaz was born in England, but her parents, originally from Pakistan, moved to Canada when she was three in search of a better life for themselves and their children. These days, Brampton is one of the most multi-cultural cities in Canada, a minority-majority community where a very large proportion of the residents are from South, Central and West Asia. When Nawaz’s family arrived, she was the only brown girl in her classroom, though she was joined a few years later by a girl whose parents had immigrated from Afghanistan.
Because she is a very funny person, Nawaz speaks lightly, humorously, about not fitting in, about bring ostracised by the nice white girls because of the food she brought for lunch, her unfashionably modest clothing, her hairy legs on display in gym class, the list of differences that set her apart, marked her as alien. The list of incidents, large and small, that extended into adulthood, representative of the unthinking racism around her.
At the same time, Nawaz describes with considerable wit the contradictions and complexities of living as a faithful, but modern, Muslim, in a primarily non-Muslim world, from finding halal marshmallows for a campfire to persuading your parents not to arrange your marriage, at least not yet. She talks about finding her husband, getting started as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, about her experience making the hajj, about being a Muslim in North America after 9/11, and about the making of Little Mosque on the Prairie. Along the way, she educates her readers, through some occasionally side-splitting anecdotes, about many aspects of Muslim life, from the importance of designing a bathroom for ease of ritual ablutions to the controversies over men and women praying together in the mosque, to the Muslim traditions of observance for the dead.
Laughter is a universal human experience, and there are ways of de-mystifying and de-exoticising that perhaps can best be done through humour such as this. Certainly I felt in reading it, a great sense of connection to an intelligent, witty woman who takes the essence of her religion seriously, but questions its sexism and its quirks, and can laugh with love at the foibles of her family and community while demonstrating the shared humanity that links all our experiences. And in terms of the aspects of her personal life that she shares in this memoir, there are things that I’m pretty sure every middle class working mother of four can relate to with a sense of recognition.
Too often, in parts of the world that are mostly white and Christian, Islam is misunderstood, its differences made to stand out. But Nawaz makes us see the similarities. In her description of the hajj, for example, the rituals, the places, the histories and events connected with each part of the pilgrimage, the symbolism of the acts required of the Muslim on hajj, and her own emotions and responses as she moves through the process, one sees the ways in which this central Muslim experience is like the (more familiar to Western minds) Christian religious rituals and traditions, from Lent to pilgrimages to such places a Lourdes, in how it develops, and what it means to those who take part.
In the end, perhaps the best thing I can say about Nawaz’ book is that I laughed all the way through, frequently nodded in recognition, and ended up feeling more than ever that people are people regardless of how they worship or what they wear.
Nawaz was born in England, but her parents, originally from Pakistan, moved to Canada when she was three in search of a better life for themselves and their children. These days, Brampton is one of the most multi-cultural cities in Canada, a minority-majority community where a very large proportion of the residents are from South, Central and West Asia. When Nawaz’s family arrived, she was the only brown girl in her classroom, though she was joined a few years later by a girl whose parents had immigrated from Afghanistan.
Because she is a very funny person, Nawaz speaks lightly, humorously, about not fitting in, about bring ostracised by the nice white girls because of the food she brought for lunch, her unfashionably modest clothing, her hairy legs on display in gym class, the list of differences that set her apart, marked her as alien. The list of incidents, large and small, that extended into adulthood, representative of the unthinking racism around her.
At the same time, Nawaz describes with considerable wit the contradictions and complexities of living as a faithful, but modern, Muslim, in a primarily non-Muslim world, from finding halal marshmallows for a campfire to persuading your parents not to arrange your marriage, at least not yet. She talks about finding her husband, getting started as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, about her experience making the hajj, about being a Muslim in North America after 9/11, and about the making of Little Mosque on the Prairie. Along the way, she educates her readers, through some occasionally side-splitting anecdotes, about many aspects of Muslim life, from the importance of designing a bathroom for ease of ritual ablutions to the controversies over men and women praying together in the mosque, to the Muslim traditions of observance for the dead.
Laughter is a universal human experience, and there are ways of de-mystifying and de-exoticising that perhaps can best be done through humour such as this. Certainly I felt in reading it, a great sense of connection to an intelligent, witty woman who takes the essence of her religion seriously, but questions its sexism and its quirks, and can laugh with love at the foibles of her family and community while demonstrating the shared humanity that links all our experiences. And in terms of the aspects of her personal life that she shares in this memoir, there are things that I’m pretty sure every middle class working mother of four can relate to with a sense of recognition.
Too often, in parts of the world that are mostly white and Christian, Islam is misunderstood, its differences made to stand out. But Nawaz makes us see the similarities. In her description of the hajj, for example, the rituals, the places, the histories and events connected with each part of the pilgrimage, the symbolism of the acts required of the Muslim on hajj, and her own emotions and responses as she moves through the process, one sees the ways in which this central Muslim experience is like the (more familiar to Western minds) Christian religious rituals and traditions, from Lent to pilgrimages to such places a Lourdes, in how it develops, and what it means to those who take part.
In the end, perhaps the best thing I can say about Nawaz’ book is that I laughed all the way through, frequently nodded in recognition, and ended up feeling more than ever that people are people regardless of how they worship or what they wear.
