While the Arab Bedouins of the seventh century Islamic conquests were certainly renowned for their military prowess, by the 9th century these communities were becoming increasingly settled and sedentary. At this point a common perception had developed among literate elites that certain races were suited for certain tasks - the Persians for bureaucracy, the Arabs for their writing on Islamic jurisprudence, the Daylamites as infantrymen, and so on. The 9th century Abbasid writer al-Jahiz also sought to fit the Turkic peoples into this paradigm in his essay entitled The Merits of the Turks:

Neither the Khârijites nor the Bedouins are famous for their prowess as mounted bowmen. But the Turk will hit from his saddle an animal, a bird, a target, a man, a couching animal, a marker post or a bird of prey stooping on its quarry. His horse may be exhausted from being galloped and reined in, wheeled to right and left, and mounted and dismounted: but he himself goes on shooting...

The Turk is at one and the same time herdsman, groom, trainer, horse-dealer, farrier and rider: in short, a one-man team. When the Turk travels with horsemen of other races, he covers twenty miles to their ten...

The place of the Turkic warrior in the medieval Islamic imagination was thus one of a resilient mounted bowmen whose skill at his craft was incomparable to that of other races, even the Arab Bedouin. The first caliph to purchase a large army of slave soldiers was Al-Mu'tasim (r. 833-842), who aptly noted their skill as mounted archers and secured a trade agreement with the Samanid Emirate to procure large amounts of Turkic slaves. Hugh Kennedy notes that these soldiers were similar to the knights of medieval western Europe, "few in number and very expensive to maintain." The fact that such considerable resources were sunk into purchasing Turkic slaves suggests that many Islamic polities were keenly aware of the military prowess of the Turkic peoples. It is also worth noting that some scholars, like Patricia Crone, do not accept this explanation - instead they argue that the recruitment of Turkic slaves to serve in the military, "represents the the bankruptcy of the Islamic polity, the failure of the community itself to produce and acceptable ruling elite."