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Exposing Some of the Meanest and Pettiest Men in History

Khalid Elhassan January 20, 2021 32 min

Jane Greer - Out of the Past — Jane Greer with Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. Associated Press

18. Bragging Came Back to Bite Al Mutanabbi Big Time

Al Mutanabbi’s patrons often handsomely rewarded him with generous gifts of cash. However, Al Mutanabbi’s greatest hope was to get appointed as a governor of some province. He impressed as an unsurpassed poet, but did not impress as a potential governor. Being a jerk, his personality was prickly and his overweening pride was often off-putting. Such traits, combined with the dramatics frequently accompanying creative genius, gave his patrons pause, and his ambitions of ruling a province were never fulfilled.

Al Mutanabbi was also known for devastating verse insulting those who rubbed him wrong – usually rival courtiers competing for a patron’s attention, but sometimes patrons who failed to reward Al Mutanabbi as richly as he thought he deserved. Such insulting poetry got him killed in 965 when a subject of his disses waylaid him near Baghdad. Outnumbered, he sought to flee, but then his pursuers derisively recited some of Al Mutanabbi’s bold lines, in which he bragged about his courage. He 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.