Al-Mutanabbi
- Lived
- 915 - 965 CE
Who was Al-Mutanabbi? The Iraqi poet of the tenth century whose command of the Arabic language has been called unmatched in fourteen centuries. His diwan is memorized across the Arab world.
The Iraqi poet of the tenth century whose command of the Arabic language has been called unmatched in fourteen centuries. His diwan is memorized across the Arab world.
Life
Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad ibn al-Husayn, called al-Mutanabbi, was born in Kufa in 915 CE. He was educated in Damascus and Aleppo. His early poetry was so audacious that he was accused, as a young man, of claiming to be a prophet. The kunya al-Mutanabbi, the would-be prophet, stuck with him for the rest of his life.
He attached himself to the court of Sayf al-Dawla al-Hamdani in Aleppo, the Hamdanid emir who defended northern Syria against the Byzantines. There he wrote the qasidas of his greatest period: praise for Sayf al-Dawla, elegy for the Muslim martyrs, and the great war poems on the Hamdanid campaigns.
After falling out with the vizier at Sayf al-Dawla's court, he moved to Cairo to the court of Kafur al-Ikhshidi, then to Baghdad, then to the court of Adud al-Dawla in Shiraz.
On his return journey from Shiraz he was ambushed by bandits near Deir al-Aqul in Iraq. According to legend, he was about to flee but stopped when his servant reminded him of one of his own famous lines: the horse and the night and the desert know me, the sword and the spear and the paper and the pen. He turned to fight. He was killed there in 965 CE.
His diwan of 300+ poems is one of the four foundational corpuses of classical Arabic poetry (along with al-Buhturi, Abu Tammam, and al-Ma'arri). Individual lines are still quoted in daily speech from Morocco to Iraq.
Stories
Each story is drawn from the classical Islamic sources.