This paper examines clients (mawlā, pl. mawālī) in the Umayyad administration (660-750 C.E.) as a case study for exploring how proximity to positions of power informed one’s standing in late antique society. Clients in this time period are commonly understood as non-Arab members of tribal networks who became quasi-members upon conversion to Islam and/or manumission by an individual patron; as such, mawālī were members of society under the tribal protection of their patron. As clients, these individuals were subject to different taxation and compensation than their fellow Muslims and, as some scholars have suggested, a social stigma as second-class citizens. For the early Islamic period, scholars have often portrayed mawālī as aggrieved members of the Muslim community who manifested their frustration as “second-class Muslims” into opposition towards the Umayyad Caliphate. Recent scholarship, in particular that of Jamal Juda, has complicated this generalization by stressing the variety of clients’ economic conditions and employment. Recognizing that the socioeconomic conditions for clients was not universal, this paper explores why some mawālī were more equal than others. The paper asks two simple, yet admittedly enigmatic, questions: Who were these mawālī administrators before the Islamic conquest? And what can their pre-Islamic ancestry tell us about the impact of the Umayyad Caliphate on late antique social and economic networks? Scholars have long pointed out that many non-Muslims continued to staff administrative positions within the Umayyad bureaucracy after the conquest. These Umayyad-era non-Muslim administrators were often members of the same pre-Islamic elite families previously employed by the Byzantine or Sassanian empires. However, mawālī had to convert from something, so should we understand mawālī as the emergence of a new class of Muslim converts or the preservation of established pre-Islamic families, as was the case with their non-Muslim coworkers? The paper addresses the latter question by comparing the socioeconomic backgrounds of mawālī and non-Muslim bureaucrats based on a prosopographical approach to biographical and administrative literature (e.g. Ibn ‘Asākir’s Ta’rīkh madīnat Dimashq and al-Jahshiyārī’s Kitāb al-wuzarā’ wa-l-kuttāb). As a result, mawālī administrators provide insight into how the shifting political landscape of the early Umayyad Caliphate incorporated and disrupted pre-Islamic social and economic networks.