Although the Qizilbash constituted the political and military aristocracy of the Safavid state, our knowledge about their beliefs and rituals is still meager. Persian chronicles from the Safavid period are almost totally ignorant of the peculiar Qizilbash religious practices. In this regard, travelogues and diplomatic accounts of Western observers seem more promising. Nevertheless, they too have complications. First, since the Qizilbash practiced a secretive religion, it was very difficult, if not impossible, for Westerners to have a genuine insight into the Qizilbash beliefs and rituals. Second, those sporadic short reports, which are mostly based on second-hand hearsays, are spread across a large corpus of materials; hence, it needs a meticulous and laborious examination to build a sensible picture of any Qizilbash ritual. As long as the Qizilbash religion is concerned, a third group of sources, which has not been utilized for Safavid history yet, has the potential to break new ground. As the Anatolian offshoots of the Qizilbash, the Alevis of Turkey preserved many religious and cultural traditions of their ancestors in both written and oral forms. Especially Alevi religious treatises that deal with matters of doctrine and ritual provide us with a considerably rich amount of information on the Qizilbash-Alevi faith and rituals. Some of these treatises, which are traced back to the sixteenth century, can be used as a source for the religious practices of the Qizilbash in Safavid Iran. In his 1993 article “The Chūb-i Ṭarīq and Qizilbāsh Ritual in Safavid Persia,” Alexander H. Morton has discovered some valuable details of an important Qizilbash ritual, namely ritual beating with a special stick called “chūb-e tarīq.” Morton derived his information mostly from Venetian sources, most of all the travelogue of Michele Membré. Although he was aware that the Alevis of Turkey practiced a similar ritual, he did not utilize Alevi primary sources in this study, which were indeed unknown to him. In a particular Qizilbash-Alevi book called Manāqib-e Awliyā, which was written in the sixteenth century under the auspice of Shah Tahmasb, there is a detailed explanation of this ritual, including its socio-religious roles and mythological origins. Primarily relying on this previously unused account and building on Morton’s study, this paper first determines the ritual of chūb-e tarīq and then examines its religious and political functions in the Safavid-Qizilbash religio-political organization.