← Back to the front page

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Escapades, and Other Lesser Known Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan January 21, 2020 33 min

William Carver - Butch Cassidy — Butch Cassidy, far right, The Sundance Kid, far left, and other members of the Wild Bunch gang. Wikimedia

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.