The Safavids emerged onto the historical scene as a Sufi order of Shaykh Safi al-Din Ishaq (1252–1334) in the town of Ardabil in Iranian Azerbaijan at the height of Mongol/Ilkhanid power. The heads of the order are purported to have engaged strictly in contemplative Sufism within the Sunni fold with no ostensible signs of political activism or Shiʿism for the first four generations. This religiously normative and politically muted demeanour, combined with their widespread following in regions as far-flung as Azerbaijan, Anatolia and Transoxiana, earned the order the esteem and patronage of many contemporary ruling authorities, including the early Ottomans who would send the Safavi shaykhs yearly donations under the name of çerağ akçesi (lit. candle money). The turning point in Safavid history came at about the middle of the fifteenth century. This is when the Safaviyya would be transformed from a conventional Sufi order into a radical religio-political enterprise with messianic overtones that exerted a powerful attraction over people well beyond the limits of its traditional following. This new grouping would be designated – pejoratively by its detractors, and with approbation by its affiliates – as the Kizilbash (T. Kızılbaş; P. Qizibash).

This chapter offers a revisionist reading of the formative period and nature of the Kizilbash milieu that highlights its pre-Safavid socio-religious underpinnings. It does so primarily in the light of Safavid-related Alevi sources, and by expanding on discussions in the previous chapters concerning the Wafaʾi origins and Abdal/Bektashi affinities of a large number of Kizilbash/Alevi ocaks. I propose that the early Kizilbash milieu, contrary to its conventional perception as a nebulous collection of (Turkmen) tribes, is best thought of as a complex and dynamic network of overlapping dervish and Sufi circles, and sayyid families, all with their own tribal and nontribal clientele, which flourished in late medieval Anatolia and the neighboring regions. This coalition of like-minded dervishes, Sufis and sayyids, who coalesced under the spiritual leadership of the Safavi household, played a constitutive role in the formation of the incipient Kizilbash movement.