This paper investigates the modes of interaction between the Ottoman state and the Kizilbash as well as the Nusayri communities in a comparative way. Both of these communities represent a form of Islam that heavily diverges from Hanafi-Sunnism, which was increasingly fashioned as official Ottoman Islam in the course of the 16th century. Furthermore, both groups share a history of persecution, which continued intermittently during this period and which until today constitutes an important aspect of their respective collective identities. Yet, persecution, banishment or execution were but one side of the Ottoman treatment of both Kizilbash and Nusayri: The state also tried to integrate them into its administrative apparatus when- and wherever possible. For example, both groups as well as individuals belonging to them were also registered as regular tax-payers in the ottoman tahrir defterleri from the 16th century onwards. Taking this observation—and its implications—as a starting point, this paper inquires into the ways Kizilbash and Nusayri further interacted with the local Ottoman state in the bilad-i sham and in central-Anatolia. Drawing mainly on the mentioned tax registers and on court records (kadi sicilleri), this paper seeks to stake out several different spaces and modes in which the Anatolian Kizilbash and the Arab Nusayri regularly interacted with the Ottoman State and its local agents respectively. The examples given illustrate, on the one hand, how these heterogeneous groups were treated, labelled and thus perceived by the state and thereby accommodated to the Empire’s administrative measures and its apparatus of power. On the other hand, they also enable us to delineate how these subjects themselves approached and used the state’s institutions, such as the kadi’s court, for example, in arguments over land-use or for renewing rights of mutasarriflik. As such, the findings serve to revisit the history of these communities in the Ottoman Empire, integrating a narrative of accommodation and strategies of long-term-survival into the dominant perspective on their persecution as “heretics”. Therefore, this paper argues that convenience was one of the most important principles shaping the relation of the Ottoman State to its Kizilbash and Nusayri subjects. With reference to Tezcan’s argument for conveniencia, as opposed to convivencia as basic principles of organizing difference, the paper discusses the possibilities and constraints of such a concept for coming to terms with a comparative history of the Kizilbash and the Nusayri in the Ottoman Empire of the “post-classical age”.