As part of their nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms, the Ottomans declared that no class of people could be held inferior to another on the basis of language, race, or religion. The Suryani Christians were then faced with a problem: did they constitute a “class of people” of their own? Until this point, they had been represented to Istanbul through the Armenian patriarch as effectively an extension of the Armenian community. By the late nineteenth century, however, the Suryani were no longer satisfied with this hierarchical arrangement known as yamakl?k. In order to end it, they had to demonstrate their complete independence of and distinctiveness from the Armenian church and community. This paper examines how the Suryani effected such a separation by considering two aspects of this project: the efforts by the church to reconnect with distant Suryani across the eastern provinces of the empire, and the church’s attempt to extend its authority over the Syriac Christians of southern India. By thus exhibiting the coherence and extent of the community—reaching as far as Sri Lanka and the Malabar coast of India—the Suryani church and patriarch sought to make the claim that the community’s subordination to the Armenians was obviously unnatural and patently absurd. In order to subvert one form of hierarchy, however, the church had to institute others internal to the category “Suryani” itself, evidenced by the solidification of ecclesiastical authority over the community. By examining this Suryani experience of the late Ottoman project of “equality,” this paper seeks to move beyond, first, teleological accounts of Ottoman history that assume that the empire was (or at least ought to have been) moving steadily toward equality, and second, a tendency to render the divergence of Ottoman reform from European lines of secular development as a “failure.” Instead, the paper asks a question more appropriate to the historical record: how did the Ottoman project of equality transform those entities that it sought to equalize? Extrapolating from the Suryani experience, it argues that equality did not replace hierarchy but rather relocated hierarchy within, rather than across, identitarian categories.