For those who really care about al-Mutanabbi's thievery from Abu Tammam, I will expose his thievery from a latter-day poet far below Abu Tammam in stature and fame, lacking Abu Tammam's technique, his savvy, and his elevated style: namely, Nasr al-Khubza’aruzzi (The Rice-Bread Baker). Because if you really want to understand how al-Mutanabbi rips off Abu Tammam, you need to stop focusing on just him.
I'm well aware that some reject my view. They don't accept that al-Mutanabbi would copy the baker-poet, preferring Abu Tammam to a contemporary whose verse is ignored by scholars. They care only for imitations of al-Mutanabbi's great predecessor, whose prestige looms in their minds. But al-Mutanabbi's fans only know the sublimity and prosperity of his later years. They didn't know him when he was a total unknown of obscure station, even though this period of his life lasted longer than his riches and high estate, when his name became famous, his wit and acumen known to all.
The following report came to me from Abu 'l-Qasim ‘Ali ibn Hamza al-Basri, one of his closest friends who knew him best. Abu 'l-Qasim said he was with al-Mutanabbi at the time of his arrival in Kufa from Egypt, and observed his reaction when an old man [who had known the poet as a young man] used him less reverently than al-Mutanabbi was by then accustomed to. "Ho, Abu 'l-Tayyib!" the old man said. "When you took leave of us, you had three hundred poems in your catalog. Thirty years later, you're back with just a hundred some-odd poems. Did you go scattering them along the road?"
"Cut the funny stuff," said al-Mutanabbi.
"Then tell me what happened to the poem called al-Shāṭiriyya (?), your emulative response to the poem by al-Khubza’aruzzi. You went all the way to Basra to make him hear it! Why have you stricken it now?"
"That poem was a lapse of my early career," said al-Mutanabbi.
"Do you remember any of it?" I asked the old man, and he recited a few verses.
Abu 'l-Qasim said: I let the question sit for a good long time, until I found another pretext for asking al-Mutanabbi: "Were you ever in Basra?"
"Yes," he said.
"Where'd you stay?" I asked him, and he named a house that I knew to be just four or five houses down from Nasr al-Khubza’aruzzi's shop. And then I knew the old man was telling the truth.
Abu 'l-Qasim reported also that he asked al-Khubza’aruzzi's neighbors about al-Mutanabbi, and was told that long ago, in his youth, Abu 'l-Tayyib had indeed fraternized with him. But the stans deny that al-Khubza’aruzzi would hold any appeal for him. Due to the baseness of his poetic art, and his contemporaneity, they don't consider al-Khubza’aruzzi worthy of study, let alone an actual source for al-Mutanabbi. And so they miss al-Mutanabbi's appropriations of his work.
From A Fair Judge of Thieves and the Stolen-From: An Exposé of the Plagiarisms of Abu 'l-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi by Ibn Waki‘ al-Tinnisi
