Al-Harith participated in the Muslim conquest of Syria,[3] successively fighting in the battles of Ajnadayn in Palestine and Fahl in Transjordan, both in 634. He fought under his paternal first cousin Khalid ibn al-Walid at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636.[4] In 637 Caliph Umar gave al-Harith a stipend lower than others in the army because of his relatively late conversion to Islam. Unhappy with his pay, he permanently established himself in Syria with seventy members of his family.[5] Accounts in the traditional Islamic sources about the date and cause of his death vary, with a number of sources reporting that he died in battle at Ajnadayn in 634 or at Yarmouk in 636, while others holding that he died in the plague of Amwas in 639.[3][4][6] In any case, by the latter date, all but two or four of his seventy family members had died in Syria, in battle or due to plague.[7]
Descendants
One of al-Harith's few surviving sons, Abd al-Rahman, was brought back to Medina by Umar, one of whose wives had been al-Harith's daughter Umm Hakim, and rewarded him with an allotment of land.[7] He fathered an influential family of the Makhzum in Medina, having thirteen or fourteen sons and eighteen daughters.[7] The family forged marital ties with other families of the Makhzum, as well as with the Umayyads and the Zubayrids,[7] both Qurayshite contenders for control of the caliphate during the First and Second Muslim Civil Wars. Chehab family, the former ruling dynasty of the Mount Lebanon Emirate descends from Al-Harith ibn Hisham.[8][9]
^Hitti, Philipp K. (1928). The Origins of the Druze People: With Extracts from their Sacred Writings. AMS Press. p. 7.
^Mishaqa, Mikhail (1988). Thackston, Wheeler McIntosh (ed.). Murder, Mayhem, Pillage, and Plunder: The History of the Lebanon in the 18th and 19th Centuries by Mikhayil Mishaqa (1800-1873). State University of New York Press. p. 23.