Last night, as I scanned the list of contributors to this week’s summer fiction issue of The New Yorker, I was surprised to see the name of my upstairs neighbor Mohammed Naseehu Ali.

Not only was I proud to see that Mohammed had made it into The New Yorker (not for the first time, I might add) but I was even more impressed that he was sharing space in the same issue as Vladimir Nabokov and Haruki Murakami.

Mohammed’s short story, Mysteries of Flight, is a perfect example of his simple, engaging, and I think, elegant, style:

Since childhood, I have lived in two completely different worlds: the world of Islam and that of the Christian West. I grew up in Kumasi, Ghana. On weekdays, I attended the local Catholic primary school; weekends I spent at the madrassa, where I memorized verses from Islam’s holy book, the Koran.

The mudir, or headmaster, of the madrassa, who was also my uncle, was named Ustaz Salman. Ustaz was a man whose high intellect and theological wizardry made him somewhat imperious and impatient with the slow or dyslexic among his students. But, of all my uncle’s eccentric and belligerent characteristics, the one that stood out the most for me was his love-hate relationship with the West.

This was a man who every day read the two main English-language newspapers in the country; he also listened to the BBC news three times a day, as if the broadcasts from Bush House, London, breathed oxygen into his lungs. He often expressed admiration for Western achievements in science and technology, but he was also fond of insisting that none of the advances made by the West had ever outsmarted death. One day, I heard my uncle tell the assistant mudir that his lack of faith in the West arose from the simple fact that the white man couldn’t make electricity shock-free. In my uncle’s view, something that gives light, energy, and even life should not also harm or kill. This perceived failure alone was enough to cast doubt in Uncle’s mind over the entirety of Western civilization.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Meanwhile, if you live in London, you might want to pop along to one of Mohammed’s readings next month, when he will be in England as a finalist in this year’s £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Mohammed will be reading from his collection of short stories, The Prophet of Zongo Street, at the Royal Overseas League in London, on July 4, and at the Southbank Centre Literature Festival, on July 6.

The winner of the Caine Prize will be announced during a ceremony at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, on July 7.