Focusing on a subject greatly neglected in scholarship, the paper discusses the relationship of Persian and Turkic in Safavid Iran, the respective role of these two literary languages in Safavid intellectual life, and how literary activities in Turkic can be connected to developments in Safavid religious politics in the first half of the sixteenth century. As a case study, it presents Muhammad al-Katib Nashati’s Turkic translation of Tavakkuli b. Ismail b. Bazzaz’s Safwat al-safa, the voluminous official hagiography of the Safavid dynasty written around 759/1358. Nashati produced his translation in 949/1542 in Shiraz under the patronage of Shahquli Khalifa of the prominent Qizilbash Turkic Dhu al-Qadarlu tribe, several members of which as governors of Shiraz sponsored book production and painting extensively for generations down to 1596. On the one hand, I will focus on how Nashati’s work ties in with the patronage policies of the Dhu al-Qadarlu and what it tells us about their position in the Safavid system. On the other hand, I will compare Nashati’s translation with Ibn Bazzaz’s Persian original, trying to shed light on how this translation reflects the shifts in Safavid religious politics. As is well known, Shah Tashmasp (r. 1524-1576) ordered Ibn Bazzaz’s hagiography reedited, in order to bolster the Safavid claim to descent from Musa al-Kazim, the seventh Imam in Twelver Shiism. Establishing the relationship of Nashati’s translation to the different versions of the Persian original, I will demonstrate that Nashati’s work fits Safavid endeavors under Shah Tahmasp to popularize Twelver Shiism in Iran, and that it also reflects the attitudes of such powerful Qizilbash governors as the Dhu al-Qadarlu to the dynasty and to its support of Twelver Shiism as opposed to the antinomian, messianic religiosity of the early days of Safavid rule in Iran.