Sha'aban (Arabic: شعبان) is the eighth month of the Islamic calendar. This is the month of ‘separation’, so called because the pagan Arabs used to disperse in search of water. On the fifteenth night of this month falls the Shab-i-Barat: ‘The Night of Records’; some people think that on this night the prophet Muhammad told his followers that Allah records all the deeds that the humans have to perform for the next year.

The Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, and months begin when the first crescent of a new moon is sighted. Since the Islamic lunar calendar year is 11 to 12 days shorter than the solar year, Sha'aban migrates throughout the seasons. The start and end dates for Sha'aban are as follows (based on the Umm al-Qura calendar of Saudi Arabia):

Sha (Ш ш; italics: Ш ш) is a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in "sheep", or the somewhat similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/ in Russian. It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet, for Slavic and non-Slavic languages.^{[citation needed]}

In English, Sha is romanized as ⟨sh⟩ or as ⟨š⟩, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian.

Sha has its earliest origins in Phoenician Shin and is linked closely to Shin's Greek equivalent: Sigma (Σ, σ, ς). (Note the similar form of the modern Hebrew Shin (ש), which is probably the origin of this letter, deriving from the same Proto-Canaanite source). Sha already possessed its current form in Saints Cyril and Methodius's Glagolitic alphabet. Most Cyrillic letter-forms were derived from the Greek, but as there was no Greek sign for the Sha sound (modern Greek uses simply "Σ/σ/ς" to spell the sh-sound in foreign words and names), Glagolitic Sha was adopted unchanged. There is a possibility that Sha was taken from the Coptic alphabet, which was the same as the Greek alphabet but had a few letters added at the end, including one called "shai" which somewhat resembles both sha and shcha (Щ, щ) in appearance.

Bashar Hafez al-Assad (Arabic: بشار حافظ الأسد‎, Baššār al-ʾAsad, ‎‎‎Arabic pronunciation: [bæʃˈʃɑːɾɪlˈʔæsæd])‎; born 11 September 1965) is the current President of Syria and Regional Secretary of the Syrian-led branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. His father Hafez al-Assad ruled Syria for 29 years until his death in 2000.

Al-Assad graduated from the medical school of the University of Damascus in 1988, and started to work as a doctor in the army. Four years later, he attended postgraduate studies at the Western Eye Hospital, in London, specializing in ophthalmology. In 1994, Al-Assad entered the military academy and in 1998, Al-Assad took charge of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In December 2000, Assad married Asma Assad, née Akhras. Al-Assad was elected as President of Syria in 2000 and 2007, unopposed each time. During the Syrian uprising, activists and protesters have called for President al-Assad's resignation.

Bashar Hafez al-Assad was born in Damascus on 11 September 1965, the son of Aniseh (née Makhluf) and Hafez al-Assad. His father, Hafez al-Assad, born to a poor family of Alawite background, had risen through the Party ranks, to take control of the Syrian-led branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in the 1970 Corrective Revolution, thus installing himself as president. Hafez al-Assad purged the Party, and introduced effective Alawite rule of Syria.

Tamer Shaaban (Born November 2, 1988) is an Egyptian American film maker, writer, and actor who received a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology May, 2011. On January 25, 2011 he created films showing the Egyptian people’s frustrations with the Egyptian regime when the revolution was sparked. His first film received over 2 million views and was blocked in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., and Jordan. The film was featured in The Huffington Post, was viral on Reddit, and was shared on Facebook more than 150K times. Shaaban spoke on CBC about his film, its role, and the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak. His second video shows students from different nationalities showing their support for Egypt. The video was featured on Al-Jazeera, was analyzed on Egypt’s national television, as well as many different blogs.

He worked with Sami Yusuf on his unofficial music video and also helped create the official video for Yusuf’s single “I’m Your Hope” in February 2011.

He currently works at Microsoft in Washington DC.

Bouthaina Shaaban (Arabic: بثينة شعبان‎) (b. 1953) is a Syrian politician and is currently the political and media adviser to the President of Syria. Shaaban served as the first Minister of Expatriates for the Syrian Arab Republic, between 2003 and 2008, and has been described as the Syrian "regime's face to the outside world."

Born in Homs and a member of the Baath Party since the age of 16, she was educated in Britain and obtained her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Warwick. She is married with two daughters and a son.

Shaaban worked first as an interpreter for the Syrian presidents Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad. Under Hafez she became an "adviser to the Foreign Ministry," and in 2003 she was named Minister of Expatriates, "a new post created to try to lure wealthy Syrian expatriates abroad — or at least their resources — back home." In 2008 she was appointed political and media adviser to president Bashar al-Assad. Between 1985 and 2003 she was also the professor of Romantic poetry at the English department of Damascus University.