Zarqa Nawaz created the CBC comedy series Little Mosque on the Prairie, the worlds  first sitcom about a Muslim community living in the west. She wrote, directed, and produced  episodes for the show, and it premiered to record ratings in 2007, going on to win a Gemini that year. The show was also nominated for Best Television Series Comedy at the 2007 Directors Guild of Canada Awards. Internationally, Little Mosque won awards for Best International Television Series and Best Screenplay at the 2007 RomaFictionFest. In addition to a six-season run, the series has been broadcast to over 60 countries. It made its American debut on Hulu in 2012 and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Following the success of Little Mosque on the Prairie, Nawaz sold and wrote comedy pilots for ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox Studios. Her memoir, Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, appeared on The Globe and Mails bestseller list and was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, the Kobo Emerging Writers Award, and the Saskatchewan Fiction Award. In recognition for  her contribution to the world of arts, she received The Brampton Walk of Fame in 2019. 

The second season of Nawazs self-titled web series, ZARQA, in which she stars, writes, and produces, launches Friday, October 6 exclusively on CBC Gem. She also recently released her new novel, Jameela Green Ruins Everything (Simon &  Schuster Canada in Canada, and Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in the U.S.) - a satire about a disillusioned American Muslim woman who becomes embroiled in a plot to infiltrate an international terrorist organization and, in the process, reconnects with her loved ones and her faith.