When Tāhir grasped this, he pressed to remove himself from the caliph’s presence and persisted until al-Maʾmūn appointed him over Khurāsān. The caliph also assigned him one of his own attendants, instructing that attendant that, should he notice anything suspicious in Tāhir, he was to poison him.⦗1⦘

Later, when Tāhir ascended the Friday pulpit and failed to pray for al-Maʾmūn, the attendant laced a dish of kāmākh⦗2⦘ with poison, and Tāhir died that same night.

This Tāhir was nicknamed “the Man of Two Right Hands,” though he had but a single eye. ʿAmr ibn Bānah⦗3⦘ said of him:
O man of two right hands yet only one eye—
one eye denied, one extra hand supplied!

Scholars differ as to the meaning of “Two Right Hands.” Some say it was because he struck a man with his left hand and split him in two; others maintain he was so called because he governed both Iraq and Khurāsān.

Tāhir was open-handed and much praised. He loved poetry and rewarded it lavishly. On one occasion he boarded a river barge known as a ḥarrāqa, and a poet⦗5⦘ recited:
I marvel at Ibn al-Ḥusayn’s ḥarrāqa⦗6⦘:—
that it stayed afloat—how could it not sink?
Two seas are upon it: one above,
another below it, closing in tight.
Still more amazing, its planks—when his touch has met them—
why do they not burst into leaf?

Tāhir rewarded him with three thousand dinars and said, “Add more lines and we shall add to your reward.”

Ibn Khallikān⦗7⦘ commented: How excellent are the verses another poet composed about a certain notable who ventured out upon the sea:
When he mounted the deep I entreated, imploring:
“O Allah, who sets the winds in motion by His grace,
You have made the bounty of his hand like the ocean’s billows—
so keep him safe, and make the billows like his hand.”