One of the key reasons that individual proto-Mamluk soldiers played such a role in events is that Islamic society was still deeply personal in rule and bureaucracy:
However while that universal vision helped topple the state whose wars with the Himyarites were a motif in the lifetime of Muhammad himself, it did not spare the Ummayyads a second Fitna, in which again key specific roles in the individual battles were taken by the proto-Mamluk Dinka and Nuer enslaved men who served in armies and were capable of hewing down generals. The Muslim world never lost the full connection to the institutions and infrastructures of the state that Western Europe did, but like the Roman Empire that did not enable it to avoid the specific limits of a political system reliant on overmighty generals or centralized political power in the person of a king whose injury or death on the battlefield could and did risk the unraveling of a state.
Thus the set of chance and 'bottom rail on top' chaos of the battlefield could and did see those dragged into the long and ugly history of slavery in the Muslim world have a chance to literally murder the elites of the world that dragged them into its abyss. This was also the first shadow of the recurring pattern that would dominate medieval and early modern Islamic history that the specific cultural factors that made Mamluk forces possible also made it extremely probable that yesterday's devoted elite professional army was today's 'I want to be Sultan instead of the Sultan.'
The very realities that made Mamluks a universal trait of late medieval and early modern Islamic societies did not permit a ready end-run around this problem of the kind that abstractly could be taken by other societies, because the same factors were the ones that promoted European condottieri in late medieval times in Europe, where the main and very important distinction is that the European man at arms was a free man who sold his own services and happily impaled bosses who did not pay him, and the Muslim counterpart was a slave who self-freed himself by impaling the bosses who did not pay him and replaced him as Sultan in a way condottieri never really managed in Europe.
Islamic History Series Early Islamic history is a mess. And here I don’t mean that the study of early Islamic history is a mess, although it
