Yahya ibn Umar

), when ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad, the leader of the Zanj Rebellion, claimed to be the incarnated form of Yahya.

[13] Al-Masudi mentions that many elegies were written for Yahya, and that he had recorded some of them in his Kitab al-Awsat (The Middle Book).

But in his book The Meadows of Gold, it is the elegy by Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (which Al-Masudi alone had preserved) that he gives pride of place.

Ibn Abi Tahir's elegy on the crucified Zaydi rebel is composed of 14 lines and the poem was possibly recited in Samarra, where Yahya's head was displayed, or else before the large crowds that are known to have gathered in Baghdad.

In the elegy, Ibn Abi Tahir attacks the Sunni Abbasid Caliphal family for its usurpation of the rights of the house of Ali.