Prior to the Islamic era, Banu 'Amilah were nominally Christian, in accordance with the surrounding inhabitants of the land. Despite having left Arabia centuries earlier and having intermarried with locals to a limited extent, they still retained a strong sense of their Arab origins and identity even leading up to and after the Muslim Arab conquests of the Levant from 634 to 638. However, the spectacular success of their ethnic kinsmen under the Caliphate inculcated in the tribe a sense of envy and threatening encroachment upon the independence of their settlements and absorption into the wider Arab sphere. As a result, the tribe sought as much as possible to isolate themselves and preserve their unique status from Caliphate authority. This desire especially intensified and acquired a newfound urgency with the establishment in 661 of the Umayyad Caliphate capital in nearby Damascus, Syria. As a result of this anti-establishment stance and the later neglect of the Levant under the Sunni Abbasids and Tulunids, the tribe (along with other, especially rural, residents around the Lebanon) was particularly open to alternate theologies espoused by Shia movements that occasionally uprose and threatened the Umayyads and later Caliphates. This affinity to the Shia cause was strengthened following the captivity in nearby Damascus of the remaining family of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, following the Battle of Karbala.