Shah Isma‘il’s defeat of Alvand Mirza, the ruler of the north-western provinces of the Aqquyunlu empire, in 1501 and his subsequent ascension to throne in Tabriz has been accepted as a turning point in the history of the Middle East. Iranian nationalist historians have celebrated this momentous event as a great rupture that marked the Persians’ takeover of their country after a long foreign invasion by the Arabs, Mongols, and Turks. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Safavid period gained further significance since the Islamist historiography celebrated it as the end of the long dissimulation period when the proper faith (Shi‘ite Islam) was established on land. Based on these two premises, common wisdom in modern historiography tends to consider the Safavids’ rise to political power an overturn by a Shi‘ite-Persian dynasty of the long-lasting Sunni establishment backed by the Turko-Mongolian military governments. Concomitantly, it assumes that the adversaries of the Safavid project were Sunni inhabitants and Turkish military overlords of Iran, even the Turkish elements that carried the dynasty to power, i.e., the Qizilbash. Challenging the common wisdom, this paper favors continuities over ruptures and maintains that the rise of Shah Isma‘il, or more properly, the rise of the Qizilbash confederation, should be considered another cycle of Turkmen politico-military domination in Iran with some significant changes in the power structures. It argues that the Qizilbash revolution led by Shah Isma‘il initially emerged as a movement against the Aqquyunlu politico-military establishment rather than the Sunni socioreligious establishment in Iran. It was because of that the only group that Shah Isma‘il showed no mercy was the members of the Bayindur, the paramount clan of the Aqquyunlu confederation who became the victims of a genocide at the hands of the Qizilbash. By the same token, the decisive event that marked the shift of dawla or “the turn of fortune” to the Safavid dynasty was not Shah Isma‘il’s victory against Alvand Mirza in 1501 but his victory against Sultan Murad, the ruler of the south-eastern provinces of the Aqquyunlu empire, two years later. That is why, we should accept this date as the effective end of the Aqquyunlu dawla, hence the beginning of the Safavid state.