A closer look will find the gaping holes in Kosminsky’s either-black-or-white portrayal of British Muslims too many to count. Here are but a few:

Spoof 1 : Nasima’s mentor teaches her to be discrete and never attract attention. Then she drives Naz on a motorcycle through the narrow lanes of Peshawar where nothing could have proved a bigger head turner in those crowded places.

Spoof 2 : Where do you find a female worshipper saying prayers standing between two male prayers on either side? Life in the training came seems to be juxtaposed from the Russian dramas portraying Chechnya making the portrayal of life in frontier outposts both problematic and patchy.
Spoof 3: Having got Riz laid with fellow spy, the only time Kosminsky finds convenient to get Naz and Jude together in the bed is when Naz’s mother is in hospital and her mate still in custody. If Naz could be thus comforted, how she will opt for eternal pains?

I wonder if instead of remaining captive of his own contrasts, Kosminsky ventured some new angles by switching the characters’ education and career paths.

An interesting twist would have been that following their arrest on false drunk driving charges Sohail becomes a Juijisto champion (or Bradford’s answer to Amir Khan). Nasima becomes the next Shami Chakrabarty an icon of upholding the liberties against all odds. But perhaps showing such trajectories wouldn’t bring the stirs the producer sought.

Rita Jones, London

I think that certain details in this drama really showed that the programme-makers hadn’t done their homework, such as the dress of the female trainees at the training camp. It is *well-known* that women in that environment wear full hijab and cover their faces in front of men, and that the men would not have touched them as happened during the “covenant” scene. They also didn’t explain how a lookalike to Nasima ended up dead in a ditch.

Also, the bit about the control orders might have worked if the programme was presented as some sort of cautionary tale about where the Blair control order legislation might lead, but that wasn’t my impression at all. Much as there have been no female suicide bombers in this country (and the only women tried for involvement in any way have been cleared), I’ve not heard of a single woman being given a control order, and it seemed strangely lenient given that she was allowed to go into college and somehow trusted not to meet people who were on the list of people she couldn’t meet but one of whom went to that college. And the idea of someone killing themselves after that – particularly as she wasn’t under the order that long when she did it, and her friend still managed to get into her house to talk to her – doesn’t ring true, particularly for a Muslim.

Too much artistic licence and/or ignorance, in my opinion.

Yusuf, New Malden, Surrey

S. Shaikh, Radio Shak