The Banu Shihab were purportedly an Arab tribe originally from the Hejaz. According to the 19th-century historian Mikhail Mishaqa, they were descendants of the Banu Makhzum clan of the Quraysh tribe to which the leader of the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Syria, Khalid ibn al-Walid, belonged. Mishaqa held the family's ancestor was a commander in the conquest, Harith, who fell in battle at the Bab Sharqi gate of Damascus during the Muslim siege of that city in 634.Mishaqa, ed. Thackston 1988, p. 23. At some later point, the tribe settled in the Hauran region south of Damascus.Abu Izzeddin 1998, p. 201. In 1172, the Banu Shihab migrated from their home village of Shahba in Jabal Hauran westward to Wadi al-Taym, a plain at the foot of Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh).Winter 2010, p. 128.
