“Allah Have Mercy,” by Mohammed Naseehu Ali, appears in the April 1, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. Here we present excerpts from Colin and Jennifer’s discussion about the story, edited for length and clarity. Also, check our our associated short essay about how this great story can be read as a political allegory.
▶ Initial thoughts on the story
Colin: This is a fantastic story. I was sucked into it. What is it about? The story completely defied my expectations. I thought it was a religious story based on the title and although it had a religious backdrop, I didn’t feel this was a religious story. My sense is, this is a story about a community facing abuse by a psychopathic [proverbial] dictator and how they dealt with it.
Jennifer: This story was not the story that I expected to read from The New Yorker this week. For me, the violent nature of the relationship between the boy and his uncle really struck me. We get a very clear sense of place, and that was pivotal for my understanding of the story. And once the more psychological aspects of the story emerged, I found a much richer experience than it was on first glance.
Colin: Right? Yeah, exactly. I thought I would have a different interpretation. I thought it was going to be like an overtly religious story based on the title. But then I thought, Well, it’s in The New Yorker, it’s probably not going to be an overtly religious story, and it turned out, not within the first paragraph I got the sense of the tone. I think this is a very classic New Yorker story.
Jennifer: The author synthesized, in vivid detail, what was happening in the mind of this prepubescent boy as he is trying to make sense of the world he’s in. The essential tension of maturing from boyhood into young adulthood. The interconnecting, contradictory, morally important questions linger well after the story concludes.
Colin: I could really put myself in the narrator’s shoes. I was going along with this fictive dream I was in. I was completely immersed in this story. I thought it was just utterly such a great story. The character’s positive traits in the sense of being an apostle of not so much forgiveness, but of patience.
Jennifer: So I think it’s just this interesting tension between How do you live in reality? How do you respect tradition and custom and still tell the truth? For me, there was a lot to ponder about who is telling the truth and more specifically, who is allowed to tell their truth if it goes against someone else’s.
Colin: This is a story that can be read on multiple levels. This story is about a boy with a psychopathic, child abusing uncle in a community who, in their powerlessness, turn a blind eye. This is also a story about [when read allegorically] a dictatorship, about manipulation, about political control, about keeping people oppressed, about keeping them down and sowing fear in their minds, so they don’t stand up to overthrow the dictator. Dictators, what do they do? They trade in fear, right? They use language or fear, which goes right back to Orwell and all the great writers on this.
▶ Story structure
Jennifer: This well-crafted story takes the reader in so many directions. There’s not a straight path.
Colin: Yes, that’s a good point. The story is told retrospectively. The narrator knows how the story ends when telling the story.
Jennifer: But we don’t. We’re on a journey together to discover what’s ahead.
Colin: I didn’t ever have any reason to doubt the narrator’s reliability in this story. There were no signs given to us that the narrator was unreliable. There’s something very interesting that happens at the end. Right? I think the ending was great. And more importantly the author is not playing games with us at all. It’s not extremely obscure, as some stories these days, in the modern fiction world, tend to be highly obscure. This is very clearly written.
▶ The role of religion in the narrative
Jennifer: The way the story unfolded for me, I didn’t see the religious structure of the community providing the boy with any solace or protection. It was a cover for blatant abuse of power at the hands of his uncle.
Colin: We talked about how [the jinns] acted as a kind of like a scapegoat, or something like that. It was a pat excuse. We don’t really think the boy or any of the other community members [patently believed it].
Jennifer: I can see the narrator pulling us in two directions on this. And it is an interesting point, Colin, that the boy relates that if he is beaten to death by his uncle, he’ll go to this special place for children who haven’t hit puberty yet. This was a very interesting concept, which I wasn’t previously aware of, which made me question how closely the boy followed the religious teachings.
▶ The death of Uncle Usama
I never found out exactly how Uncle Usama died. All I heard was what was whispered that night about a violent car accident.
Jennifer: This was such a psychologically dense story for me, due to the many conflicting feelings brought to the surface. When we find out that Uncle Usama has died, the boy initially felt numb, with no emotion at all.
“Allah have mercy,” I repeated, though deep in the pit of my stomach I felt that my cries and prayers were meant not for Uncle Usama but for Hafiz.
Jennifer: Although Uncle Usama was the boy’s greatest tormentor on in life, social decorum demands that the living do not denigrate his memory. For me, that beautiful tension between I don’t want to speak ill of the dead and but I’m here now, telling you the story of Uncle’s misdeeds in life rang true.
Jennifer: However, we only find out at the end that this entire story is being told about a man who is now dead. Right? We are documenting the crimes Uncle has committed against his family and his community while acknowledging all of the reasons we are willing to defy those cultural expectations.
Colin: The end of the story is fantastic, and it’s completely believable that the narrator doesn’t feel guilty and feels guilty for not feeling guilty or feeling sad. But you know he points out that he’s really talking about his cousin, not the uncle when he said:
“If anything, I felt guilty, because we were taught at the Madras to not under any circumstance speak or think ill of the dead even if they were one of the worst enemies in life. We were taught to pray for the deceased to ask for all us forgiveness on their behalf to beg Allah’s mercy to allow them entry on the day of Judgment. With that in mind, I put aside my bitter feelings. I had carried all week.”
Colin: What I like about this is that the narrator or the author in this case didn’t feel like I have to be clever about this. I’m just going to say it, even though I understood as a reader who his cries for mercy were for. I thought it was nice that the author confirmed this. And I thought, this really is the opposite of Joyce, who tells you nothing, and you have to figure out everything by going to a million guidebooks. In this case the author is very upfront.
▶ Thoughts on the last line
For Allah to have mercy and keep the jinns away from my cousin, as Uncle Usama would not be around to defeat them the next time they tried to steal Hafiz from us.
Colin: How ironic, the idea that “the next time they tried to steal Hafiz from us” is extremely ambiguous. That last line almost reverses everything we’ve expected up till now. Did the boy believe that Uncle Usama was actually warding off the things that he himself caused? Is it Stockholm Syndrome? What is going on in that last line?
Jennifer: That last line really struck me as, Wait a minute: You think the jinns are going to come back? And that Uncle Usama was protecting you from them? In this moment, we are fully embodying the young boy’s belief that people don’t suffer from mental illness; they get possessed by jinns. That’s one thing that I continue to wrestle with when I think about this story.
▶ Jinns, mental Illness and other threats
Jennifer: Does anyone in this community actually believe in this superstitious stuff about the jinns? Or is it just a justification or a smoke screen to explain away reality?
Colin: People often use superstition to give themselves a sense of psychological safety where there is no safety, right?
Jennifer: And that brings up a scene I wanted to come back to:
One woman said that an evil spirit had been on the loose the past three days, stealing children’s souls, and that my mother was lucky the bad spirits had accosted me while I was in the compound. “We would’ve been wailing on the streets searching for him right now,” the woman continued.
I realized that Grandmother’s suggestion was the closest anyone had come to admitting that I had been hurt by the beating, that my state wasn’t the fault of any jinn or spirit.
Colin: The superstitious element is interesting because it almost serves to justify this guy’s behavior, or at least it excuses his behavior, right? And that’s really the core of the story, I think: nobody except the mother was willing to call this guy out for what he was actually doing.
One day, when Hafiz was seven and I was nine, he had suddenly started talking to himself and to invisible people who seemed to be in his company. Kaka Sati explained to me that jinns were bothering Hafiz and “toying with his mind.” While playing with friends, Hafiz would curse and threaten to slap or kick other kids that only he could see.
Two days after Hafiz’s first paranoid episode, Uncle Usama prepared a special rubutu for him to drink and to wash his body with. He also created a powerful talisman inscribed with all the ninety-nine names of Allah. The talisman, sewn in crocodile skin, was given to Hafiz to carry on his body at all times, to help drive away the bad jinns.
Jennifer: The boy, however, has his doubts about what was really happening:
But, in my own mind, I questioned whether any jinn was truly following Hafiz; I had a feeling that his behavior was a direct result of his constant state of anxiety caused by Uncle’s explosive temper.
Jennifer: It felt like religion and superstition were intermingled in some ways in this story. The community used various belief systems as a cover or as a smoke screen to not deal with the facts as they were presented. The characters keep referencing that they go to prayer. They are praying for mercy. They are reading the texts. They are trying to live lives that follow the tenets they were being given. But as the boy so clearly pointed out, Uncle Usama, who is seen as the leader of this community, is doing the worst behavior of any of them.
▶ Counterexamples of male kindness
Uncle’s massive build was enough to deter anyone who thought of intervening on my behalf. For some of the onlookers, especially the fruit hawkers and food venders who lined the front side of the Rex Cinema, this wasn’t the first time they had witnessed a helpless child being dragged by Uncle Usama, who was, in fact, the official disciplinarian of Zongo Street. Parents would send for him to punish their misbehaving children.
Colin: He was described as being a muscular man who could rival Uncle Usama. He was almost the mirror image of the uncle. He could have been a female, a woman, an old grandmother, another child, but the author, specifically chose a muscular mirror image of Uncle Usama except this man shows his compassion.
Meanwhile, the muscular man was trying to reason with the bread vender. “Listen, he is only a child,” he said. “The fault is with whoever sent him. Imagine if he were your son and out this late. Please have pity on him,” he pleaded.
I explained my side of the story to a tall, muscular man, whose imposing appearance reminded me of my uncle, though he seemed affable, even kind. He listened attentively to my story, and as I spoke the bread seller fumed with anger, muttering curses under her breath.
Colin: I believe that’s actually why he put that guy in. I think those guys were inserted to belie a stereotype because what other purpose does he serve?
Jennifer: Well, I think the two men in the marketplace serve the purpose of showing instinctive kindness and that theses strangers can see the injustice. So there is all of this tension about who’s responsible and how to show compassion.
▶ Thoughts on why Uncle Usama leaves town
Uncle had even sworn to whip Hafiz’s corpse if he died before receiving his punishment. But Mother didn’t believe any of his declarations. She said of him, “Don’t mind that liar. He’s saying all that just to mask his shame. You wait and see, that useless man is not going to touch the boy.”
Colin: But what happened to the uncle, really, we don’t know. It’s ambiguous. Intentionally, we don’t know. We can’t know. But I thought maybe [he left town] because he seemed to be shunned. I think he was feeling that he was being shunned because the mother, just one person, shunning him publicly.
“Please let me feed him before they kill him,” she lamented, her voice tinged with rage. The women were taken aback by Mother’s behavior—not so much because of what she had said but because of the anger with which she said it. This was unusual for her. “If I don’t make a stand and fight back they will kill my son for me,” she sobbed, and held the soup bowl to my face.
Colin: To a wannabe dictator like that, that alone could be enough to unsettle him. That’s like the one thing that starts unraveling the entire beast right, the one thread that unravels the edifice of this, of this psychopath, who requires complete and utter loyalty, unquestioning, obeying of his commands. When you have one person who’s making a protest, a peaceful protest, but albeit a protest against his abuse, his psychology starts to unravel, he feels weak, he feels shunned. Maybe he did himself in. And it’s interesting when you examine it. That is an interesting thing that we cannot prove either way.
Jennifer: Their prayers for mercy for themselves have been answered when the terror stops. Right before we find out Uncle Usama has died, and I love this element in the story, the boys in the community are enjoying the carefree joy of playing outdoors without the threat of Uncle Usama looming over them.
But I was so delighted by the news of Uncle’s trip that I promptly decided to end my imprisonment. And, by Allah, it felt good to be outside. That evening we played all kinds of games in the front yard. For the first time any of us could remember, we played in a carefree manner, as children are supposed to.
And we were so engrossed in our games that we didn’t even notice when adults started gathering in the front yard. The women walked in a hurried, distracted manner, some without their veils, pacing back and forth in front of the compound. The crowd grew so large that it resembled a durbar. We noticed the grave looks on the faces of some of the people, and also the secretive manner in which they whispered to one another.
Jennifer: And in the very next scene, the boy hears the women wailing and doing these funeral songs and the truth of Uncle Usama’s death becomes known.
Then we heard the sharp, shrill wailing of a woman, crying, reciting in a singsong manner, “Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un. Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un.” Knowing what those phrases meant, I froze, and so did every kid around me. The sad and piercing voice of the funeral crier continued, reciting the phrases over and over, and very soon the cries of women and children filled the night air.