Umar ibn Shabba

Abū Zayd ʿUmar ibn Shabba ibn ʿAbīda ibn Rayṭa al-Numayrī al-Basrī (789–878) was a Basran historian, poet and teacher, who specialized in the histories of notable men, including poets and key cities of the Caliphate: Basra, Kufa, Medina and Mecca. He had a reputation as a reliable historical authority among his contemporaries and later Islamic historians. Although his extensive collection of written works are largely lost, abundant fragments of these works and other materials and quotations of Umar are preserved in the works of later authors, particularly the 10th-century historians al-Tabari and Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani.