Similarities of Two Stories

Two blogs in one day. Ready, GO!

The short story No Music Before Mosque by Zebun-Nissa Hamidullah is the tale of a young man named Ali who plays his flute before prayer. This act is unholy, and he gets severely punished for it. While reading this story, I thought of a few similarities between it and A Thousand Splendid Suns. These similarities lie within basic story line similarities, and conceptual similarities.

The first story similarity I noticed between the two stories is that they both have similar settings. A Thousand Splendid Suns is set in Afghanistan during the late 1900’s and semi-modern day. No Music Before Mosque is set in Pakistan. The short story was published in 1992, so my guess is that it is set in or around that year. These settings are similar. Afghanistan and Pakistan have similar cultures and communities, and the time periods of both are the similar. The second of the story line similarities lies within the end of No Music Before Mosque and quite close to the beginning of A Thousand Splendid Suns. In end of No Music Before Mosque, Ali, the boy who played the flute, was found hanging from a tree. At the end of chapter five in A Thousand Splendid Suns, Nana is found hanging from a tree. This similarity is not really a huge comparison, but it relates the stories with the concept of the “jinn.”

In the beginning of A Thousand Splendid Suns, Nana continuously mentions an evil being called the “jinn” that will come to possess her if Mariam does not do as she is told. Mariam does not do as Nana tells her, and when she returns home, Nana has indeed been possessed by the jinn, and has hanged herself. In No Music Before Mosque, Nazo, Ali’s niece, goes to a tree by a pond, which is said to be haunted by the jin (spelled with only one “n” in this story). Even though it is never said that the jin had to do with Ali’s death directly, the mention of it in the story at all makes me believe that it could have had something to do with his death.

Another conceptual similarity I found between the stories was the characterization of Mariam and Ali. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mariam is called a “harami” by her mother, which means she is a bastard child. This phrase puts a lasting shame on Mariam, and often in the novel she refers back to this shame. In No Music Before Mosque, Ali has a similar characterization. While he is not a bastard child, it is revealed that his playing the flute before prayer in the story is not the first time he has done this. His father is extremely angry with him, and continuously says he will severely punish Ali. This compares to Mariam because Ali has also had to grow up being punished for expressing himself with his flute. His father is putting shame on him by punishing him.