Yahya ibn Yahya al-Ghassani
Yahya ibn Yahya ibn Qays al-Ghassani (; 684–750s) was the Umayyad governor of Mosul during the reign of Caliph Umar II (), a transmitter of hadiths (traditions and sayings attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad) in Damascus, where he spent the majority of his life. He was a member of an elite family of the Ghassanids in Damascus and his descendants were also hadith transmitters in Damascus as late as the 9th century. Life Yahya was born in 684. He was the son of Yahya ibn Qays ibn Haritha ibn Amr (d. 684), the head of the shurta (security forces) of the Umayyad caliph Marwan I (). They were members of the Ghassanid tribe, which, during the 6th century, served as federates of the Byzantine Empire in Syria and adopted Christianity. During the Muslim conquest of Syria many Ghassanids under the chieftain Jabala ibn al-Ayham fled the region with the retreating Byzantine armies, but a significant number remained and became part of Syria's military, political and scholarly elite and embraced Islam during the governorship and caliphate of Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (640s–680). Yahya's family was noted as an "honorable household" by the Damascene historian Ibn Asakir (d. 1176). Caliph Umar