Amid what appears to constitute a global intensification of nativism and racism, scholars have grown increasingly attuned to transnational solidarities and belongings. In this paper, I explore how Arab refugees living in Turkey navigate a socio-political landscape that is increasingly characterized by hostility toward their presence. Taking as my case-study primarily young, devout Syrian men who have settled in Istanbul, I consider how a shared religious register allows these men to negotiate their relationship to Turkish citizenry on the basis of a shared identity, sometimes framed in terms of fictive kinship (e.g. "brothers"). Moving beyond reductive tropes that treat refugees as a people 'on the move' or 'out of place,' I look at the sorts of contingent belongings that form through these transnational interactions, as well as the practical forms of support that Islamic communities and sociality provides. This research draws on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Istanbul district of Fatih, where I conducted dozens of interviews and extensive participant observation among an Islamic renewal movement. I suggest that my interlocutors adopt and adapt what they perceive as underlying Turkish classificatory systems (such as a religious/secular binary) and thereby situate themselves along these fault-lines, so as to effectively forge affiliations with a particular segment of the 'host' population. The subjectivities of belonging that emerge are conditional and limited, dependent as much on constructing and maintaining distance and distinction from the populations whom they deem hostile toward their presence as on upholding relationships and camaraderie with those whom they affiliate.