Fight against the Arab invasion In the stories of Jabala in the Islamic literature, he is figured as the last
Ghassanid king and a military leader of the
Byzantine Empire's Christian Arab contingent during the
Muslim conquest of Syria. He is cited in such a capacity during the
siege of Dumat al-Jandal in , where he commands the Ghassanid and
Tanukhid tribes against the Muslims, and at the
Battle of the Yarmuk in 636, during which the Muslim Arabs routed the Byzantines and went on to conquer
Syria from them. According to the Abbasid-era authors
Ibn Ishaq,
al-Waqidi, and
al-Baladhuri, at Yarmuk, Jabala led 12,000 men of the Ghassanids and the other Christian tribes of
Lakhm,
Judham, and groups of the
Quda'a tribe, such as the
Balqayn and
Bali. The Islamic literature abounds with stories of Jabala's conversion to Islam sometime after Yarmuk, then leaving Islam and taking refuge under Emperor
Heraclius. There are different versions of the stories, but they generally have Jabala arrive to the Muslim capital at
Medina with his entourage, set off for the
Hajj pilgrimage with Caliph
Umar, have an altercation with a lowly pilgrim whose nose he ultimately breaks, threaten to leave Islam, and finally make a nightly escape which ends with his relocation to Byzantine territory.
Retreat into Byzantine territory Jabala's flight to Byzantium supposedly occurred in and he made the trek through
Raqqa (Byzantine Callinicum) with 30,000 of his or allied Christian Arab tribesmen (incl.
Tanukhids and
Iyad Arabs) and their families. While they were close to
Baghras crossing to Cilicia, they were attacked by Maysara ibn Masruq who had been dispatched by
Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah, the supreme commander of the Muslim troops in Syria. While some sources claim that the refugees were massacred, a complete annihilation is unlikely as the force of Maysara ibn Masruq was much smaller and it is known that several of the Arab refugees later served Byzantium. The survivors thereafter took abode in the
Charsianon region of Byzantine
Anatolia. The geographer
al-Istakhri mentions the descendants of these tribesmen in that region during the 10th century. According to the historian
Walter Kaegi, the purported flight of so many Arab tribesmen was a motivating factor for the Muslims to conquer Raqqa and
Upper Mesopotamia in general, so as to prevent such nomadic exodus from the conquered lands to Byzantium; such exodus contravened caliph
Umar's policy of subjugating all nomadic Arab tribes under the Caliphate's rule. The Byzantine emperor
Nikephoros I is said to have been a descendant of Jabala. ==Assessment==