Channel 4 thriller 'Britz' asks, are Muslims bombers or spies?
On Wednesday and Thursday of this week Channel 4 will be airing a two part thriller called Britz about a sister and brother who react in different ways after September 11th. Sohail (played by MC Riz, who also starred in The Road to Guantanamo) joins MI5 in a bid to find the terrorists. His sister Nasima (played by Manjinder Virk who was in Bradford Riots) feels alienated by foreign and domestic policy and the reactions of her neighbours and peers. Channel 4 bills the series as an exploration of Muslim life under anti-terror legislation and whether these laws are making us safer or putting us in greater danger.
Khurshid Ahmed of the British Muslim Forum said: 'Channel 4 should be working with us to defeat terrorism and extremism, not sowing hate and division in our communities, and reinforcing negative stereotypes.' The Home Office added, we can understand the British Muslim Forum's concerns. Given Channel 4's remit as a public service broadcaster, they should listen to the views of moderate Muslims who reject violence and extremism, and they should air those views alongside this film.' Channel 4 think it will deal with key issues of racism, identity, MI5 recruitment and spying and Islam. It remains to be seen if the show will be a positive contribution to the debate or further caricature Muslims and the choices they make.
Spy or bomber? Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me... How about depicting a choice to be (as almost all Muslims are) a peaceful British Muslim citizen who feels pain at the suffering of innocents, who wants to participate in national and local life, and who just want to get on with living life like everyone else?
posted by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed at 12:04
9 Comments:
is there any group that has 'rubber stamped' this?
if not, can anything be done to pull it off the air if british muslims feel that its not appropriate?
what really annoys me are the comments made by people who havent actually seen it yet. for goodness sake, let it air before the pro and anti muslim rants take off. anyway, i guess its precisely what C4 desired.
Now you've seen it, what did you make of the programme?
I struggled to get to grips with either of the main protagonists.
Sohail, so dutifully British he had to rush from classroom to Spooks HQ, and before you could blink was a trained, qualified field operative tasked with preventing major terrorist acts. All in two months? Not personally, politically or dramatically did that quite add up.
And the sister Nasima - politically aware and astute, (though seemingly wilting when confronted by a couple of semi-tough questions from the brethren about the impotency of fighting from within the system), her friend hangs herself so she goes to train as a suicide bomber?
And she ignites the bomb whilst embracing her brother? That takes a special kind of blind obedience to an ideology that I never saw realised in Nas.
Both characters seemed to be rushed by the author to the points they needed to be for the sake of the climax of the drama.
You could make a case for two people being taken further than either ever really intended or understood. Explore that with some subtlety and you might have a decent drama.
Alternatively you could have a Saf from Spooks, confident and assured in his role, suddenly having to confront boyhood friends who were now set on destroying the world he seeks to safeguard.
But did this play work for you at any level? I'm not sure it did for me.
BRITZ: Spoof 1
Nasima's mentor teaches her to be discrete and never attract attention. Then she drives Naz on a motorcycles through crowded narrow lanes of Peshawar.
Nothing can be a bigger head turner than that in those crowded places.
Spoof 2
Where do you find a female worshipper saying prayers standing between two male prayers on either side?
While Naz's mother is admitted for heart trouble, Naz copes with it by being in bed with a fellow medical student/boyfriend. Wrong timing or bad taste?
Perhaps viewers were expected to put common sense to rest to enjoy propaganda packaged as entertainment.
A better story would have been that instead of they heading to extremes that one siblings assists the police by providing information about activities in the Muslim community which the police act on but which might not have been 100% and the other either fund raises for what looks like a benevolent fund for children in the occupied territories but turns out to be a front for Al-Qaeda or they directly provide access to a safe house for what they believe is a group assisting those fleeing oppression but which is in fact plotting a bombing somewhere in the UK.
And the informant sibling is killed by accident as they happen to be at the location of the attack by the people assisted by the other sibling.
Too neat an ending but I think more realistic in terms of the type of support that either side requires to function, someone has to be the water that the fish swim in as Mao might say.
Salaam Shelina. I hope you're well. I know this is late but I just saw your blog! Shelina, I really like your synopsis but your conclusion contradicts it.
You state yourself that Channel 4 considered this "an exploration of Muslim life under anti-terror legislation." Nowhere could this have been more poignantly and clearly depicted than it was in Britz. Those that spy and are spied on are surely those that are most obviously affected and it is their stories that should be brought to the fore. This was never supposed to be a social project showing the world how easy it is to be a moderate Muslim in today's Britain, but about how anti-terror legislation has polarised and divided the moderate Muslim community.
My point is precisely that this polarisation that is being depicted does not exist. Muslims do not fall into the two options outlined here - far from it, only a handful of people out of a population of millions occupy these spaces. How then is that a helpful exploration?
Sadly, my experience has been very different. I have seen how the legislation has lead to the radicalisation of young moderate Muslims or a rejection of Islamic identity for fear of persecution. Many British Muslims are frustrated at being targetted and treated with constant suspicion, so they embrace suicide bombers' ideology. "Britz" attempted to portray what drives a British Muslim to become a suicide bomber, which is a question the British public has been battling with since 7/7. It shows that it is the British government's actions that have lead to many Muslims distrusting them and is a criticism of their increasingly draconian anti-terror laws.
As an exploration of the actions of a few individuals, journalists have to investigate all options. The problem is though that this dichotomy is one that most Muslims reject, but which unfairly characterises a whole community with a broad brush. And even those you may have seen 'radicalised' by this rhetoric rarely go on to do anything. They may have extreme and possibly even inhumane ideas, but extremely rarely will they blow themselves and others up.
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