Zabība, the Ethiopian (Abyssinian) bondwoman of the Banū ʿAbs, mother of the pre-Islamic poet-warrior ʿAntara by her master Shaddād ibn Muʿāwiya. Because the child of a slave-mother inherited her status, ʿAntara was born a slave and dark-skinned, the twin facts on which the whole ʿAntara romance turns. She is the maternal node of ʿAntara, previously carried in the corpus only within his prose.