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.
[2] 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.
[6] The historian Wilferd Madelung views the reports about Amr ibn Murra's Himyarite advocacy as credible,[7] and thus dates the efforts to link Quda'a with Himyar to Mu'awiya's rule.
[6] He speculates the efforts were politically advantageous for the Quda'a as the Himyarites formed a significant proportion of the troops in Egypt and that Mu'awiya hoped to "extend his marriage alliance with Kalb indirectly to Himyar" through forging their genealogical links.
[9] Crone, on the other hand, considers the narratives about Amr ibn Murra to be "exceedingly doubtful"; she questions his biography, as he was held to have been an old man in Muhammad's time but lived well into Mu'awiya's caliphate, and suspects that he is mainly used in the early sources to advocate for the Himyarite descent of the Quda'a.
[7] Links between the Quda'a and the South Arabian tribes were also demonstrated in the reorganization of Kufa, one of the two chief Arab garrison towns of Iraq by Mu'awiya's governor there in 671.
[11] By this point, there were three major tribal confederations in Syria: the Quda'a, which had a strong presence in the central districts of Jordan, Damascus and Hims where they were allied with the tribes of Ghassan and Kinda; the more recent northern Arabian arrivals of the Qays, who were mainly concentrated in northern Syria where the Quda'a lacked a foothold; and the Qahtan,[a] which grouped the South Arabian Himyar, Hamdan and Ansar of Homs, which settled there during the Muslim conquest.
This effort was opposed by the bulk of the Judham under the elder chief Natil ibn Qays, who opted for lineage from Qahtan in alliance with the South Arabians of Homs.
[19][5] The disputes over the Quda'a's origins elicited considerable debate among early Islamic scholars, who invoked the purported opinions of Muhammad to favor either side, while others proposed "ingenious harmonizations" of Ma'addite and Himyarite ancestries for the tribe, according to Crone.
[21] The historians al-Baladhuri and Abu'l-Baqa Hibat Allah offer the opposite narrative, namely that Mu'ana was originally the wife of Ma'add, with whom she had Quda'a, and then later married Malik ibn Amr of the Himyar.