Iran before the sixteenth century could be deemed a stronghold of Sunnism. This changed only when the Safavids championing the Qizilbash rite, which is not a version of Shiism but an independent belief, took over the country in the sixteenth century. Iran thus went through two separate conversions in the Early Modern Period. This essay looks into the effects that the later Shiitization in Iran had on the Qizilbash in Ottoman Anatolia, the kinsmen of whom had conquered Iran for the Safavids and set themselves up as the military nobility of the land.

The Shiitization, which became entrenched in the Safavid establishment from the early seventeenth century onwards, paved the first stone towards the isolation of the Ottoman-subject Qizilbash, who had remained in Anatolia awaiting its conquest by their grandmaster-king, that is the Safavid shah. The Ottoman Empire, however, made its grip on Anatolia steadier and widened its borders eastwards at the expense the Safavids with almost each war fought between the two sides. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Anatolian Qizilbash and their brethren holding sway over Iran began to grow away from one another, without discerning that the split between them was becoming unbridgeable. Their unerring leader – the Safavid shah – who in Qizilbashism was a kind of embodiment of God, deemed himself no longer so, in line with Shiism, and was now punishing those who worshipped him. Those Qizilbash clans which had settled down in Iran were subjected to a stepwise Shiitization, and though keeping the name, they ended up being more of a chivalric order and coruling class rather than the original religious order organized into a military-political nobility. The Ottoman-subject brethren in Anatolia, on the other hand, stuck to the genuine Qizilbash belief.

Once the Safavid grandmaster-shah stripped himself of his godly attribution and started reigning as a worldly king, the Qizilbash in Anatolia, who remained true to their self-perceived messiah, were indeed left without a leader who would act as their flagbearer. These Safavid followers in Anatolia, like the Ottoman authorities, must not have been aware of the transformation in Iran during the early seventeenth century, that is the Shiite crackdown on the Qizilbash belief.