Scholarship on nationalism and nation-building during the early Turkish Republic (1923-1938) has focused extensively on the problem of Turkishness. That is to say, on the question of which former subjects of the Ottoman Empire did the new nationalist government count as Turks. This question has traditionally been approached using Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Kurds, and Balkan Muslims as case studies. However, the Alevis are one group that has been almost entirely overlooked as a part of this discussion. Consisting of Turkish, Zaza, and Kurmanji-speaking groups, as well as both sedentary and semi-nomadic populations, and holding religious practices that cannot readily be classified as definitively Muslim nor non-Muslim, Sunni nor Shi’i, the complexity of the Alevis provides a critical test of leading scholarly conceptions of Turkish identity, particularly those of Soner Ça?aptay. In his book Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey, Soner Ça?aptay argues that Turkish identity can be understood through a “Hierarchy of Turkishness.” This he conceives as a series of concentric rings of progressively decreasing Turkishness. At the center are Turkish-speaking Muslims. Muslims who do not speak Turkish (Kurds, Circassians, etc.) lie in the middle ring. The outermost circle consists of the non-Muslim citizens of Turkey, like Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. According to Ça?aptay, the nationalist government attempted to assimilate those within the second category into the Turkish nation, while consigning those in the outer ring to a permanently marginalized status. One of Ça?aptay’s concepts I intend to scrutinize is his notion of “cultural Islam” as a defining characteristic of Turkish identity. Ça?aptay’s definition is broad enough that it theoretically could encompass Alevi religious practices. If this were the case, then Turkish-speaking Alevis would occupy a place in the innermost circle of the hierarchy of Turkishness, indistinguishable from Sunni Turks. However, most of the secondary literature suggests that Alevis had a far more complex relationship with the state during the early Turkish Republic than Ça?aptay’s frameworks would allow. A more nuanced framework of Turkish identity must account not only for the privileging of nominal Muslim identity by a secularist state, but also of textual, Hanafi, and Sunni Islam over antinomian forms of folk Islam, like Alevism.