Big Puff Piece on 'Little Mosque' Creator

I read it in--where else?--the Toronto Star on the drive home from my week up in the Parry Sound area. It's a woe-is-she article about the ultra-successful TV producer who made it her mission to put the "fun" back in fundamentalist Islam (which begged the question: When was it ever there in the first place?). The source of her woe? She's not feeling the love closing in on a decade since 9/11:

REGINA—Zarqa Nawaz lets her hijab drape gracefully around her shoulders as she looks out her front window, where the prairie sun beats down on an empty suburban street.

“I wonder what they think of us?” she muses, gazing at her neighbours’ quiet stucco houses.

With four children, Nawaz, creator of the CBC hit Little Mosque on the Prairie, has a busy household. It’s even busier next door, where her husband’s parents live and where her brothers-in-law and their families are staying temporarily. There are a half-dozen cars in front of the two houses.

The freelance filmmaker and TV comedy writer worries when the extended family comes home about the “way things look.” Two houses full of hijab-wearing women, bearded men and lots of little children. She even frets if the grass gets too long around the mosque they attend.

“No matter how smart, how assimilated you are,” she says, “you are part of the other that is dangerous. . .

“You can’t make a mistake — you will be judged.”...

Hands up anyone who feels sorry for a chick whose unwatchable shill-com about cuddly Muslims and silly infidels has been "judged" Ceeb-worthy since January, 2007. As for her thoughts about being "assimilated"--if a half-dozen cars and two houses full of hijab-wearing women, bearded men and lots of little children is her idea of "assimilation," then I think she needs to look up the word in the dictionary.