25. Living Up to Boasts Could be Deadly
The flip side of Al Mutanabbi’s praise of patrons was his propensity to compose devastating verse insulting those who had rubbed him wrong. They were usually rival courtiers competing for a patron’s attention, but their numbers sometimes included patrons who had failed to reward Al Mutanabbi as richly as he thought he deserved. Such insulting proved his undoing.
In 965, one of the victims of Al Mutanabbi’s diss verses waylaid him near Baghdad. Outnumbered, the poet took off in attempted flight. He was steadily opening up a lead on his pursuers, until they derisively recited some of his bold lines boasting of his courage. Al Mutanabbi was stung into turning around to live up to his verse, and was killed in the ensuing fight.