23. An Attempt to Live Up to His Boasts Got This Poet Killed
Al Mutanabbi was often handsomely rewarded by the patrons whom he praised with gifts of cash. His greatest hope, however, was to get appointed a governor. He impressed as an unsurpassed poet but did not impress as a potential governor because his personality was prickly and his excessive pride annoyed many. Such traits, combined with the dramatics that often go hand in hand with creative genius, gave his patrons pause, and his ambitions of ruling a province were never fulfilled. The flip side of Al Mutanabbi’s praise was his propensity to compose a devastating verse to insult those who rubbed him wrong.
Those whom he dissed were typically rival courtiers who competed with him for a patron’s attention. Sometimes their numbers included patrons who failed to reward Al Mutanabbi as richly as he thought he deserved. Such insulting poetry got him killed in 965, when one of the victims of his verse waylaid him near Baghdad. Outnumbered, he sought to flee, but when the pursuers derisively recited some of Al Mutanabbi’s bold lines, in which he boasted of his courage, he was stung into turning around to live up to his verse, and was killed in the fight that followed.