The focus in this book so far has been on recovering the Sufi genealogies of the Kizilbash movement as they emerge from recently surfaced Alevi documents and other sources. This new framework overturns the conventional narratives of ‘otherness’ and ‘parochialism’ heaped upon the Kizilbash subject and allows us to re-envision the Kizilbash milieu as a transregional network of convents, dervish groups and sayyid families, all with their own constituencies of diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, who rallied around Safavid leadership on the basis of a set of Sufi ideas and institutions. The same framework will be used in this chapter to examine the transformation of Kizilbashism from a proselytising, revolutionary movement into a quietist religious order of closed communities with a distinct confessional identity, a process I conceptualise as Kizilbash confessionalisation.

The concept of confessionalisation, in the sense of elite-driven processes of confessional boundary-making and identity enforcement, was originally coined and employed by historians of Reformation Germany. More recently, a group of Ottomanist historians have used it to study in a more integrated fashion the widely recognised but imprecisely defined nexus of changing Ottoman imperial discourse and Sunnitisation policies during the sixteenth century and beyond. These historians have therewith sought to capture the closely intertwined nature of various political and religious developments in the early modern Ottoman context, which they discerned to have unfolded in parallel to Shiʿitisation in Iran under the Safavids, as well as to analogous developments within Europe.

The present chapter builds and expands on these recent efforts to explore the applicability of the concept of confessionalisation for a better and more nuanced understanding of the Ottoman state's policies vis-à-vis the Kizilbash communities. It argues, first, that the Ottoman state's persecutory impulse against the Kizilbash, persisting as it did even when the latter's early political radicalism had largely ebbed, cannot be reduced to a direct and inevitable outcome of the Ottomans’ rivalry with the nascent Shiʿi Safavid state. Instead, it has to be understood in the broader context of imperial confessional politics, which involved Sufism as a key site of conflict and negotiation.