There is a rooted understanding among historians that Ottoman Sunnism took its definitive shape as a result of the Empire’s confrontation with the non-Sunni Safavid dynasty as the latter emerged to be the ruling house in Persia. The problem of interpretation begins exactly at this point. A few specialists aside, İsmail Safevi’s Tabriz declaration of 1501 is regarded as Persia’ becoming, at least at the state level, Shiite. It is also taken for granted that Ottoman officials and clergy did not differentiate between Qizilbashism and Shiism. In this assumption, there are two serious mistakes that have come to be repeated over and over again, which I will address in my paper. The first one is that, despite İsmail’s declaring Twelver Shiism as the official sect, Persia as a state – including the Shah himself - remained unmistakably Qizilbash and not Shiite. The dynasty would turn to orthodox Twelver Shiism only with Shah Tahmasp during the 1530s, and to mark the clear difference between the two sects, Tahmasp would publicly repent from practices that the Qizilbash deemed licit. The Iranian state apparatus dominated by the Turkish military aristocracy, however, persisted in Qizilbashism and would become distinctly Shiite only during the seventeenth century. In the meanwhile, the Safavids’ Arab Shiite clergy imported from Ottoman Lebanon would systematically propagandize and publish against Qizilbashism, to the point that they would declare it as unbelief. The Ottomans, no less aware about the obvious difference between Qizilbashism and Shiism, reflected this awareness in the records they left behind. The anti-Safavid fatwas, treatises, and official correspondence are witnesses to this fact, as well as some valuable studies that are not as much referred to as they should be. Unlike what the historians came to take for granted, neither was the early Safavid state the Shiite polity it would come to be after the 1610s, nor did the Ottomans fail to mark this particularity. For the Sunni-Ottoman jurisprudents, Shiism was unorthodox but still within the circle of Islam, while Qizilbashism was not. Not a mere nuance, this classification had vital consequences in the realm of religion, law, and international relations. The revisions I offer to these assumptions by correcting an essential misunderstanding based on which the Ottomanists have deduced their interpretations will contribute to our understanding of Ottoman Sunnism.