10. The Prickly Poet
Al-Mutanabbi’s personality was prickly, and he was excessively proud. Such traits, combined with the dramatics that frequently accompany creative genius, gave his patrons pause, and his ambitions to govern a province were never fulfilled. The flip side of Al-Mutanabbi’s praise was his propensity to compose devastating verse to insult those who rubbed him wrong. His targets were typically rival courtiers who competed for a patron’s attention, but sometimes included patrons who failed to reward Al-Mutanabbi as richly as he thought he deserved. One particularly misguided poetic diss got him killed in 965, when the victim of his verse ambushed him near Baghdad. Outnumbered, he sought to flee. So the pursuers derisively shouted some of Al-Mutanabbi’s bold lines, in which he boasted of his courage. Stung, he turned around in a misguided attempt to live up to his verse, and was slain in the ensuing fight.
