al-Sayyid al-Himyari

Isma'il ibn Muhammad al-Himyari, known by the honorific title al-Sayyid ("the lord/master"), was one of the most prolific Arabic poets of the eighth century CE, bridging the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. He is remembered above all as a partisan poet of the Ahl al-Bayt — the family of the Prophet Muhammad — and especially of Ali ibn Abi Talib.

Tradition reports that he was born around 105 AH (c. 723 CE) into a family of Ibadi or Khariji leanings (a strand hostile to Ali's memory) and grew up in Basra, in southern Iraq. According to Shia accounts he broke with his family's beliefs as a youth; harassed for his pro-Ali poetry, he is said to have been sheltered by Uqba ibn Salm, a Shia governor of Basra.

His religious path is described in stages: first a follower of the Kaysaniyya — a sect holding that Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya was the awaited mahdi (a messianic redeemer) — he is later held, in Imami (Twelver) tradition, to have accepted the imamate of Ja'far al-Sadiq after an encounter at Kufa. These conversion narratives come from devotional Shia sources and should be read as such.

The early literary anthologist Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, in his Kitab al-Aghani ("Book of Songs"), counted him among the foremost poets. He died in Baghdad; the year is disputed in the sources (most often given as 179 AH, with 173 and 178 AH also reported — c. 789–796 CE), and his age is variously reported as 68 or 74.