Yet if the Sufyānid system could still be made to work in 684, its foundations had of course long been subject to steady erosion, and by the Marwānid period the effects began to tell: out of the unitary tribe of the Sufyānids came the soldiers and civilians of the Marwānids.

The new armies can be seen emerging from the time of ʻAbd al-Malik (685–705 [65–86]). They were not all of the same type. On the one hand, there was the Syrian field army which was based on the five districts of Palestine, Jordan, Damascus, Ḥimṣ and Qinnasrīn, and which provided garrisons for the entire empire and emergency troops wherever they might be required. And on the other hand, there were the local armies of which only those along the frontiers retained their importance. But field and frontier armies alike reveal a number of common features in terms of both composition and organization which suffice to establish the dislocation of military power from the tribal structures of conquest.

In terms of composition the dislocation is evident in two ways. In the first place, the manner of recruitment was now entirely voluntary enlistment. The unwieldiness of the old militia, difficult to mobilize and hard to keep in the field, appears to have been a problem already in the Sufyānid period; and by the time of Ḥajjāj the institution was defunct. Ḥajjāj accordingly recruited soldiers at the price of a horse, arms and three hundred dirhams for his new muqātila.