Bani Qudha'ah

The Quda'a (Arabic: قضاعة, romanized: Quḍāʿa) were a confederation of Arab tribes, including the powerful Kalb and Tanukh, mainly concentrated throughout Syria and northwestern Arabia, from at least the 4th century CE, during Byzantine rule, through the 12th century, during the early Islamic era. Under the first caliphs of the Syria-based Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), the Quda'a occupied a privileged position in the administration and military. During the Second Muslim Civil War (683–692) they allied with South Arabian and other tribes in Syria as the Yaman faction in opposition to their rivals, the Qays confederation, in what became a rivalry for power and influence which continued well after the Umayyad era. In forging this alliance, the Quda'a's leaders genealogically realigned their descent to the South Arabian Himyar, discarding their north Arabian ancestor, Ma'add, a move which elicited centuries-long debate and controversy among early Islamic scholars.

In the Arab genealogical tradition, the Arab tribes were generally divided into those with northern or southern Arabian ancestors. The ancestral origins of the Quda'a are obscure, with the claims of the early genealogists being contradictory. The Quda'a were counted among the northern Arabian Ma'add tribes in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods. Ma'add had been attested as a tribal confederation in the Syrian Desert as early as the 4th century. One of the prominent tribes of the Quda'a, the Banu Kalb, had been present in Syria centuries before the advent of Islam in the 630s, and since they and the wider Quda'a group had been present there for so long, the historian Patricia Crone comments that it is "pointless to speculate where they may have originally come from". The Quda'a, as well as the Kinda tribe, occupied a privileged position under Mu'awiya's governorship of Islamic Syria (639–661) and his Syria-based Umayyad Caliphate (661–680), as they were the foundation of his military strength.

According to several early Islamic sources, the first figure to claim South Arabian, Himyarite descent for the Quda'a was a supposed companion of Muhammad, Amr ibn Murra of the Juhayna, another major constituent tribe of the Quda'a. Amr ibn Murra urged his tribesmen in Egypt, which was conquered by the Muslim Arabs in the 640s, to join the Yamani, or South Arabian, tribes, and according to reports attributed to a late 7th-century source, Isa ibn Talha al-Taymi, and the qadi of Egypt Ibn Lahi'a (d. 790), Amr ibn Murra invoked a conversation he had with Muhammad in which the latter informed him that Quda'a stemmed from Himyar. Depending on the source, Amr ibn Murra's effort was supported by Mu'awiya or, alternatively, frowned upon by the caliph. The 8th-century genealogist al-Zubayr ibn Bakkar held that in response to Mu'awiya's order to ascertain the lineages of the Arab troops in Egypt, Amr ibn Murra proclaimed that Quda'a was a descendant of Himyar.