Shayban ibn Tha'labah ibn Akaba ibn Saab ibn Ali ibn Bakr ibn Wa'il
Religion
Paganism, later Islam
The Banu Shayban (Arabic: بنو شيبان) is an Arab tribe, a branch of the Banu Bakr. Throughout the early Islamic era, the tribe was settled chiefly in al-Jazira Province and played an important role in its history.
Its chief opponents during this time were the Taghlib and Banu Tamim. 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.[1]
Yazid ibn Mazyad served Caliph Harun al-Rashid with success as general, even subduing a Kharijite revolt by his kin al-Walid ibn Tarif al-Shaybani, while his brother Ahmad went with 20,000 tribesmen to the aid of Caliph al-Amin in the Fourth Fitna against al-Ma'mun.[1] Yazid also served twice as governor of Arminiya, a vast province encompassing current Armenia and Azerbaijan, where carried out large-scale colonization with Arab Muslims, particularly at Shirvan. He was succeeded by his sons Asad, Muhammad, and Khalid, becoming the first of a long line of Shaybani governors and the progenitor of the Mazyadid dynasty that ruled in Shirvan as autonomous and later independent emirs (Shirvanshah) until 1027.[4]
Another successful Shaybani line was that of Isa ibn al-Shaykh al-Shaybani, governor in Syria and Arminiya in the 860s–880s. His son Ahmad exploited the chaos following the "Anarchy at Samarra" and established himself as the strongest ruler of the Jazira, controlling Diyar Bakr and the Armenian borderlands of Taron and Antzitene, although he faced competition from the Taghlibi Hamdan ibn Hamdun and the Turk Ishaq ibn Kundajiq, ruler of Mosul. Ahmad managed to capture Mosul after Ibn Kundajiq's death, but was driven out by the resurgent Abbasid Caliphate under al-Mu'tadid in 893. After his death in 898, al-Mu'tadid seized the last possession of the family, Amid, and imprisoned Ahmad's son Muhammad.[1][5]
The Shayban as a whole are not frequently mentioned in the later centuries, as opposed to its many sub-tribes or splinter groups originating from it.[1] Some Shayban are mentioned in later times in southern Iraq as poets, grammarians and philologists, chief among them the Shaybani mawlaAbu Amr Ishaq ibn Mirar al-Shaybani (died 825).[1] Members of the tribe are also mentioned among the early followers of the Qarmatians in the Sawad of Iraq, and again in northern Syria in the late 10th and 11th centuries, after which "the tribe of Shayban as such is less often mentioned, and it is difficult to follow the subsequent fortunes of this highly-fragmented group" (Thierry Bianquis).[1]
But still Arabs from the Diyar Bakr region in Turkey are tracing their tribal origins back to this tribe. Some families are even claiming descendant from the famous Isa ibn al-Shaykh al-Shaybani line. However the Banu Shayban of Southeastern Anatolia are organized loose and they do not have a Sheikh as a head of their tribe, like it is common in Arab countries.