The vast majority of the scholarly work on conversion and proselytization has stayed within the framework of rigid, individualistic, and inter-religious activities. Within this rigidity, the act of conversion has been deemed as a radical and mostly individual process. This paper aims to challenge the inflexibility and individuality of the notion of conversion via expanding its boundaries into an intra-religious milieu: the Qizilbash of the early modern Ottoman Empire, the largest non-Sunni Muslim group of the empire, who constituted the majority of the population in many parts of Anatolia, Kurdistan, and upper Mesopotamia. Via integrating the convoluted story of the Qizilbash into this picture, I argue that that the term “conversion” in the early modern Qizilbash experience denoted a bond that involved various degrees of adaptation, modification, and expansion of one’s religious position within a given socio-political milieu, rather than a complete overhaul or wholesale renunciation of old religiosities, affiliations, and communal practices. In other words, for the Qizilbash of the early modern Ottoman lands, conversion was oftentimes an experience of renewal, extension, and/or adaptation, rather than the replacement of the “old” with a “new,” or the “wrong” with the “right.” Particularly throughout the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth century -when the Ottoman-Safavid imperial rivalry dominated the scene with long lasting wars, both ideological and military- a complex array of motivations and impulses differently weighted in an individual’s or group’s decision to adapt or to renounce adherences, either religious or political, or both. These motivations included preexisting religious sensibilities, universally popular predilections, charismatic leaders, desire for salvation, as well as socio-political and fiscal pressures or enticements.