Mohamed Hassan, former RNZ journalist, and creator of TV series Miles from Nowhere Photo: The Public Good
New television drama series Miles From Nowhere explores the everyday and not-so-everyday experiences of first and second generation Muslims in Aotearoa.
The show's creator, Mohamed Hassan, talked to Music 101's Charlotte Ryan about what prompted him to make the show, and the music that he chose to help tell the story.
Hassan is a former RNZ journalist and author of the book How to be a Bad Muslim and poetry collection National Anthem as well as the writer and host of The Big Picture podcast.
Miles From Nowhere draws from his own personal experiences, and the experiences of people around him.
Mohamed Hassan with RNZ Music 101 host Charlotte Ryan Photo:
"Some of those stories were things that I had reported on here at RNZ, when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to profiling and discrimination, when it comes to the aspirations of the Muslims around New Zealand and some of it were stories that we had just kind of filtered in from friends and families, people at the mosque," Hassan said.
"When you come from a small community, word gets around very quickly, and that's part of the comedy of it, you're just surrounded by people that are surveilling you - and we're not even talking about the government, we're just talking about aunties and uncles at the mosque.
"So a bit part of what we were trying to do with the show is to pull in as many stories as possible, and to try and tell as much of that experience as we could..."
It was obvious from early on in planning the story that it needed to reflect how the characters would relate to the 15 March 2019 mosque terror attacks in Christchurch, he said.
"The story that we wanted to tell was one that talked about the environment inside the Muslim community and many communities around the country in the lead-up to March 15, because it was an aspect of the story that we didn't really feel like had gotten the attention and the space that it deserved.
"This harks back to a period of time when I was here actually, at RNZ, talking to some people in the community about their experiences with surveillance, and their experiences with discrimination, whether it's by Customs at airports, or in terms of employment or in their general life, but specifically the story about counter-terrorism in New Zealand being something that had very little attention given on it.
"I don't think most people - unless they've had some kind of interaction with it - really think or know about what the NZSIS do, and the fact that New Zealand has a counter-terrorism programme, and had one for a long time, that really mimicked the one that was in the US and Australia and the UK.
"We talked sometimes about the Five Eyes partnership, and the fact that we had this sharing agreement between these five countries, that includes Canada as well. But part of that agreement also influences the way that our counter-terrorism policies work and the way that our spy agencies, our intelligence gathering agencies are allowed to operate.
"So during this time, around 2016, 2017, there was a huge focus on Muslim communities, on mosques, on what young people were posting online - this was back when ISIS was active in Syria and Iraq, and so young people, 16, 17 year olds, were suddenly being contacted by agents from SIS, who wanted to take them out for a coffee and chat about what they were posting online ... in New Zealand.
"And then they would take them out and ask them, 'hey, you wrote this thing about Palestine', or 'You wrote this thing about Syria, tell me more about that, like what do you think about it and what do you intend to do about it?'.
"And then there were moments where these agents would show up in people's homes, in their living rooms and talk to them about things they had posted online, or things from people they had interacted with, or even more sinister - asked them about other people in their community.
"All of this was happening and there was a real hype to it, where it felt like it was happening everywhere, and it fractured a lot of Muslim communities, and it caused people to turn against each other. People didn't know whether there were informants in the mosque.
"I know from some of the reporting that I did that there were informants in the mosques. And there were people that were offered - in some instances based off testimonies from people themselves, that they were offered cash by some SIS agents, ... like 'hey, we're going to transplant you to a different mosque in a different part of a country, and you just need to tell us what's going on'.
"A lot of this stuff was happening, but it was getting very little attention, because we don't really tend to talk much about terrorism in this country, at least we didn't before March 15.
"That was a part of the story where as soon as the events in Christchurch happened, there was a lot of conversation around how do we respond to it, but there was very little space to talk about what had led up to it.
"And what had led up to it unfortunately, in a lot of minds of Muslims in New Zealand was that there was so much scrutiny and focus on our communities, and there was very little scrutiny on the things that we were worried about and were trying to raise alarm about. Which was the rise of the far right in New Zealand.
"Some of the things that people were facing in their daily lives, some of the attacks, targeting of mosques around the country, which was already happening and had different spikes over the last 20 years.
"And so a lot of that felt like it was being ignored or not getting the attention that it deserved. So when we came to do a show about Muslim experiences and thought about what part of it we thought needed to be told, that period of time felt like the most crucial and the least understood."
Speaking to Music 101, Hassan spoke about a selection of songs that are meaningful to him.
Cat Stevens - 'Miles From Nowhere'
"When I was young, when I first came across his music it was really eye-opening, and I felt an instant connection to it.
"So when we came to make this show and form this character of this young inspiring musician in the Muslim community, the idea of having him inspired by Cat Stevens, by Yusuf Islam, was kind of a no brainer.
"I grew up in Egypt, and it's a culture deeply rooted in music, and music plays a part in almost every aspect of our lives.
"There's complications, because it tends to be at odds with how people think about spirituality and religion, and what space music has in that, and there are different interpretations of that.
"There are people that think that music is a thing that kind of competes with your spirituality as a kind of distraction, that the more you let music into your heart the less space there is for spirituality and remembering God and speaking about God ... then you have other places, there's a great tradition of spiritual music in India, Qawwali music which is enormous and so rich and so embedded into South Asian culture that it's hard to separate it.
"It's a constant conversation that takes place in a lot of communities."
French for Rabbits - 'The Outsider'
In making Miles From Nowhere, the production team reached out to New Zealand bands to build to source music for the soundtrack that added to the sense of place and identity.
Hassan said The Outsider is a beautiful song that plays at a turning point in the programme.
"This song in particular is really speaking to where Said, our main character, is somebody who is caught in between different worlds and trying to show parts of his identity and be authentic about that, but fearing the backlash to that and fearing that he won't be accepted as a result.
"And so much of that story circles around how he navigates through that space, and I think this song in particular really speaks to that. It just happened to fit and I think that's part of the really great process about getting to think about and getting to imagine what a soundtrack to a show looks and feels like. This one kind of leapt out at us."
