Shayban (tribe)

The Banu Shayban were an Arab tribe, a branch of the Bakr ibn Wa'il group. Throughout the early Islamic era, the tribe was settled chiefly in the Jazira, and played an important role in its history.

In the pre-Islamic period, the Shayban with their flocks wandered according to the seasons, wintering in Jadiyya in the Najd and moving to the fertile lowlands around the Euphrates for the summer, ranging from the Jazira in the north to lower Iraq and the shores of the Persian Gulf. Its chief opponents during this time were the Banu Taghlib and Banu Tamim tribes. Already from pre-Islamic times, the tribe was "celebrated [...] for the remarkable quality of its poets, its use of a very pure form of Arabic language and its fighting ardour" (Th. Bianquis), a reputation its members retained into the Islamic period, when histories remark both on their own skills as, and on their patronage of, poets.

During the time of Muhammad and his immediate successors, the Shayban were allies of the Banu Hashim (the clan to which Muhammad belonged). During the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Shaybani al-Muthanna ibn Haritha played a leading role in the conquest of Iraq. For the most part the Shayban remained active, as in pre-Islamic times, mainly in Mesopotamia, but especially in the district of Diyar Bakr, where they settled in numbers, and from there to the adjacent Armenian Highland. By virtue of this proximity, the Shayban would play an important role in the history of early Islamic Armenia and Azerbaijan. A few isolated groups and individuals of the tribe are also attested in northern Syria and Khurasan, such as Abu Dawud Khalid ibn Ibrahim al-Dhuhli al-Shaybani, a follower of Abu Muslim.

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