Hostile narratives shaped later portraits of controversial rulers, not historical deeds.

Evidence

The story is dramatic and amusing, but is self-evidently false. Its purpose is to depict al-Mu izz as an adventurer—an unscrupulous upstart who had gained power by force and maintained it by corruption. But this is precisely what al- Mu izz was not, and nothing is less likely than that he would, in this brazen way, have declared himself an impostor. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 368

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Islam-West representation cluster: it’s a concrete instance of enemies-of-a-dynasty generating a vivid, memorable, false self-presentation vignette — a version of the hostile-representation mechanism Said describes, only here intra-Islamic rather than Orientalist.