al-Mutawakkil, “You will receive no stipend from this one.”

They therefore set about plotting against al-Muntaṣir and even moved to kill him, but they could not reach him, for he was brave, imposing, vigilant, and constantly on his guard—quite unlike his father. So they contrived to slip thirty thousand dinars to his physician, Ibn Tayfūr, when the Caliph fell ill. The doctor recommended blood-letting and, when he opened a vein, used a poisoned lancet; al-Muntaṣir died of the wound.

It is also said that Tayfūr later forgot, fell ill, was bled with that same lancet, and perished.

Some maintained that al-Muntaṣir contracted an illness in his testicles and died from it within three nights. Others said he died of a throat obstruction (khawāniq), and still others that he was poisoned with a needle inserted into a pear. (1)

A report relates that during his final illness he said, “Mother, both this world and the next have left me; I hurried against my father, and retribution has hurried against me.” (2)

He was suspected of having colluded in his father’s murder, and no respite was granted him. His vizier was Aḥmad ibn al-Khaṣīb, one of the tyrants. (3)

Al-Masʿūdī records that al-Muntaṣir lifted from the Alids the fear and ordeals they had suffered, no longer preventing them from visiting the grave of al-Ḥusayn the martyr, and that he restored Fadak to the family of ʿAlī. (4) Concerning this, al-Buḥturī said:

Indeed, ʿAlī is worthier of you
and his hand toward you is purer than ʿUmar’s.