The Banu Shihab were originally an Arab tribe from the Hejaz. According to the 19th-century historian Mikhail Mishaqa, the Banu Shihab were descendants of the Banu Makhzum clan of Quraysh to which Khalid ibn al-Walid belonged, and that the family's ancestor was a certain soldier named Harith who fell in battle at the Bab Sharqi gate of Damascus during the Muslim siege of that city in 634. At some point following the mid-7th-century Muslim conquest of Syria, the tribe settled in the Hauran region south of Damascus. In 1172, during the reign of the Ayyubid sultan Saladin, the Banu Shihab migrated westward from their home village of Shahba in Jabal Hauran to Wadi al-Taym, a plain at the foot of Mount Hermon (Jabal ash-Sheikh).