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One Notorious Line Outlives a Wider Body of Verse

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One Notorious Line Outlives a Wider Body of Verse

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Imran ibn Hittan wrote lines praising Ibn Muljam, the man who assassinated the caliph Ali, verse that scandalized later generations and is documented as one of the most notorious lines to survive from any Kharijite poet. The praise is preserved as his own attributed composition rather than a line later opponents invented to discredit him, transmitted by the same hostile chroniclers who kept the rest of his surviving corpus.

That single scandalous couplet has outlasted the rest of his poetry in later memory, a documented case where one line, rather than the fuller body of verse on piety and martyrdom that surrounds it, became the detail by which he is chiefly remembered outside specialist study. A modern scholarly compilation, Diwan Shi'r al-Khawarij, gathered what survives of Kharijite poetry generally, first published in 1974 by Ihsan Abbas and reissued in an expanded edition in 1982, restoring his verse to a fuller documented context than the single scandalous line alone provides.

That one poet's praise of a caliph's assassin has outlived the larger body of verse it was embedded in marks Imran ibn Hittan's afterlife as a documented case where a single notorious line eclipsed a wider corpus only later scholarship worked to restore to view.

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Source Kharijites (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
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Kharijites (Wikipedia)
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