The major works of Zayn al-Dīn ʿUmar ibn al-Muẓaffar, known as Ibn al-Wardī (d. 749/1349), present as derivatives, commentaries, and supplements to other texts. His Tārīkh¸ for example, is avowedly the tatimma (completion) of the Mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-bashar of Abū l-Fidā (d. 732/1331). A different kind of intertextuality affecting his corpus is persistent confusion with a later Ibn al-Wardī, Sirāj al-Dīn (d. after 822/1419), whose popular, widely-copied Kharīdat al-ʿajāʾib has long been considered (fairly or not) an outright plagiarism of the Jāmiʿ al-funūn of Ibn Shabīb al-Ḥarrānī (d. 695/1295 or 732/1331). One place in Zayn al-Dīn’s corpus where the intertextuality of a derivative work has been mistaken for the intertextuality of plagiarism is his Manṭiq al-ṭayr fī irādat al-khayr. This prosimetrum text has been called an uncredited mukhtaṣar of the Kashf al-asrār fī ḥikam al-ṭuyūr wa-l-azhār of Ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī (d. 678/1279), but is better described as a line-by-line muʿaraḍa (response/rewrite) to the earlier text, whose structure and sequence it follows closely. But even if no mention of Kashf al-asrār can be found in Manṭiq al-ṭayr (which is unedited still), it does not follow that Ibn al-Wardī’s appropriation of the earlier text was concealed. Through side-by-side readings, this paper considers the dependent relationship between Manṭiq al-ṭayr and Kashf al-asrār as a creative feat of language art, and a particularly Mamlūk form of virtuosity in which secondary and derivative works are elevated to primary achievements.