The onscreen portrayal of Muslim terrorists has come some way since the nadir of 1994, when, in True Lies, Arnold Schwarzenegger was leaping off skyscrapers and endangering Miami in Harrier jump-jets to save the world from a rabid, dribbling terrorist of Arab descent. But not by much.

The War on Terror may have become staple fare for popular entertainment, but attempts to understand the enemy rarely go beyond the occasional aside in 24acknowledging that Not Every Muslim is a Terrorist, or the occasional observation in Spooks that Some Muslim Terrorists Might Have Actual Thoughts and Feelings.

Until Britz that is. The much-anticipated Channel 4 thriller aims to redress the balance, examining over two feature-length episodes what might drive British Muslims to commit atrocities in their own country.

Given the controversial subject matter, it may be no surprise that Britz (the title alludes to the Muslim predilection for shortening first names and ending them with a Z) is being broadcast by Channel 4, and has been written and directed by Peter Kosminsky, the film-maker behind such contentious films as The Government Inspector, which told the story of the late Dr David Kelly, caught up in the crossfire between the Government and the BBC over the war in Iraq; The Project, which chronicled the political lives of a group of young activists as they helped to recast Labour as an electable force; and No Child of Mine,a harrowing analysis of child sex abuse.

“We were trying to decide what to do next and bombs started going off around London,” the Bafta winner explains. “When it became clear that second-generation British Muslims were behind the attacks, I started to think about what it was that might drive people to do such things. To find out, we began interviewing British Muslims in Leeds, Bradford, the Midlands and London.”

The roots of the project were journalistic, and the film is set in contemporary Pakistan, Eastern Europe, London and Leeds, but the end product is entirely fictional, Kosminsky’s first fictional work for TV in fact. The two main characters are Sohail and Nasima, a brother and sister from Bradford, played brilliantly by the young actors Riz Ahmed and Manjinder Virk. Nasima, a trainee doctor, is politically active, emotionally vulnerable, and becomes increasingly antagonistic towards government policies after seeing her Muslim neighbours and friends targeted by government agencies. In contrast, Sohail, a law student, is more emotionally stable, and comfortable with being British. Kosminsky tracks their very different journeys: Sohail, as he signs up for MI5 and begins an investigation into a terrorist cell; Nasima, as she becomes radicalised.

“Part of the difficulty in making the film was constantly reminding myself that I didn’t have to stick slavishly to the research,” adds Kosminsky, who, as part of his preparation, also consulted organisations such as Liberty and Amnesty International on the effects legislation and foreign policy are having on Britain’s Muslim communities. “Having had years of having to sit on my imagination, letting it go was like being an alcoholic and being allowed a drink after years of repressing the desire.”

Inevitably some viewers will think that Kosminsky should have resisted the drink. The central theme is not the only challenging aspect to Britz. As a subplot, it tackles the taboo topic of black-Asian relationships. The film not only tells the story of differing Muslim responses to the War on Terror, but recounts, sympathetically and at length, detailed arguments against domestic legislation and foreign policy. Members of the government forces tackling terrorism, routinely depicted in TV drama as heroic, are at times seen as petty, bigoted and cruel.

Frankly, it might all be too much for an audience that has grown to expect to see our brave security forces occupying the moral high ground. And then there is the potential offence that a film about Muslims, made by a nonMuslim, might cause. Brave would be an understatement.

Kosminsky, who has remarked in the past that he “works on outrage”, denies that he has set out to be deliberately controversial but concedes that the film is “fairly opinionated”.

“I didn’t have a particularly strong view when we started, but we picked up a surprising amount of anger in the Muslim community and we are trying to reflect that. Funnily enough it was more difficult to construct the Sohail character, who was resolutely British, than Nasima’s radical character. There were virtually no interviews we conducted where young Muslims were determined to dig in the way he does; whereas you could definitely trace the emotions of those people who might conceivably take the more radical decision.”

But does he not think the work could have been more powerful if it was less full-on? “The whole thing is designed to explain to a nonMuslim audience why some British Muslims have done the things they have. If I had made an ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ kind of drama, I don’t think it would have worked.”

He draws an analogy between the War on Terror and the Second World War. “We don’t do any kind of service to the survivors of 7/7 by depicting those who took part as deranged fanatics, any more than it helps to say the entire German nation was in the grip of a psychosis in the 1940s. The best way of trying to make sure nothing like 7/7 happens again is to try to understand the human motivations that led to it.”

Britz, Wed and Thur, Channel 4, 9pm

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