[1] A Hyena engages in perfidy to lure a complacent stork to his lair, invoking the teachings of Islam to ensnare his prey.
When the Hyena returns to feed on the rotting carcass of the stork he "thanks Allah for a nose that can smell carrion on the wind.
[4] Biographer Johannes Willem Bertens writes: The story presents a confrontation between a rather complacent but morally concerned unworldliness and its opposite, amoral worldliness.
[5]Biographer Allen Hibbard notes that the story may be viewed as an "anti-fable" in that it rejects morals sanctioned by religious institutions: "'The Hyena' seems to suggest that religion itself, or at least its corrupt manifestations, is a hoax and that we are naive if we do not realize the Manichean principles by which the real world operates."
In a very real sense, "The Hyena" is a bit of an anti-fable: it teaches no lessons to human beings which are extraneous to human nature itself; its "lesson" is, rather, that nature desacralized and devoid of its accretion of imposed myth, or spirituality, becomes free to become itself-whereupon no moral judgments should accrue to the conse- quences of such self-attainment.