A spectacular show, in eight one-hour episodes ‘Caliphate’ helps you to understand how the nihilism natural to youth might, in some circumstances, be expressed using the language of radical Islam.
The show has a Swedish intelligence service operative named Fatima (Aliette Opheim) who manages a spy named Pervin (Gizem Erdogan). Pervin and her husband Husan (Amed Bozan) live in Raqqa, Syria. Fatima begins to cotton onto a plan involving the mercurial Ibbe (Lancelot Ncube) after Pervin tells her things using a clandestine phone given to her by a friend who is arrested by the ISIS police.
While trying to uncover the terror plot Fatima promises to help Pervin to get out of Syria, to where Pervin had, earlier, voluntarily travelled. In addition to that plotline you have one belonging to a Stockholm family made up of 17-year-old Sulle (Nora Rios), 13-year-old Lisha (Yussra El Abdouni), and their parents Suleiman (Simon Mezher) and Tuba (Ala Riani).
The articulation of key ideas in ‘Caliphate’ is of a high quality and so it stands apart from most similar cultural products that have been made over the past two decades. At the same time as I was watching it over three evenings in March I also watched an occasional episode of ‘NCIS’ (which began screening in 2003 and is still going) on one of Network Ten’s secondary free-to-air channels. ‘NCIS’ also frequently takes terrorism as a subject but the stories it uses are no match for the forensic clarity of ‘Caliphate’. The ‘NCIS’ version of radical Islam of a decade ago – the era that gave us the spectacle of Western military forces invading Iraq for the second time in a generation – is clunky and different from what we can see on TV now. Thank the Lord for small mercies.
The show has a Swedish intelligence service operative named Fatima (Aliette Opheim) who manages a spy named Pervin (Gizem Erdogan). Pervin and her husband Husan (Amed Bozan) live in Raqqa, Syria. Fatima begins to cotton onto a plan involving the mercurial Ibbe (Lancelot Ncube) after Pervin tells her things using a clandestine phone given to her by a friend who is arrested by the ISIS police.
While trying to uncover the terror plot Fatima promises to help Pervin to get out of Syria, to where Pervin had, earlier, voluntarily travelled. In addition to that plotline you have one belonging to a Stockholm family made up of 17-year-old Sulle (Nora Rios), 13-year-old Lisha (Yussra El Abdouni), and their parents Suleiman (Simon Mezher) and Tuba (Ala Riani).
The articulation of key ideas in ‘Caliphate’ is of a high quality and so it stands apart from most similar cultural products that have been made over the past two decades. At the same time as I was watching it over three evenings in March I also watched an occasional episode of ‘NCIS’ (which began screening in 2003 and is still going) on one of Network Ten’s secondary free-to-air channels. ‘NCIS’ also frequently takes terrorism as a subject but the stories it uses are no match for the forensic clarity of ‘Caliphate’. The ‘NCIS’ version of radical Islam of a decade ago – the era that gave us the spectacle of Western military forces invading Iraq for the second time in a generation – is clunky and different from what we can see on TV now. Thank the Lord for small mercies.
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