The 10th/11th-century critic al-Yamani argued Kalila wa-Dimna's 'Indian book' framing was Ibn al-Muqaffa's own invention, not a translation

The consensus transmission chain — Sanskrit Panchatantra → Borzuya's lost Pahlavi → Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's surviving Arabic Kalīla wa-Dimna — described in claim-kalila-wa-dimna-descends-from-borzuyas-lost-pahlavi is not unanimous even among near-contemporary readers. The 10th/11th-century critic al-Yamanī, in his Kitāb Muḍāhāt ("Book of Comparisons"), argued that the entire "Indian book" framing — the claim that the work descends from a foreign Sanskrit source at all — was Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's own invention: that he adapted pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and dressed it in a foreign-translation conceit, rather than genuinely rendering an Indian original into Arabic. The argument is reported by the 2020 AnonymClassic project's critical-edition article, which cites al-Yamanī directly but does not itself adjudicate the dispute.

This is a minority position — every other Tier 1–2 source in this vault's current cluster treats the Sanskrit-to-Pahlavi-to-Arabic chain as settled — but it is a documented one, from a period close enough to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. c. 757 CE) to carry some evidentiary weight of its own, and it is the sharpest attested challenge to the chain's authenticity this vault has found.