Thanks to the digitization of manuscript libraries in Turkey in the twenty-first century, it is much easier to access thousands of manuscripts today than it was in the twentieth century. The aggregate collection is heavily skewed toward religion. While this may be expected as religion was a major subject heading in most pre-modern libraries, the overwhelming hegemony of Sunni Islam over the category of religion is nevertheless striking. Since the government is only sponsoring the digitization of the Islamic heritage, Christian and Jewish manuscripts that are still in Turkey today are not represented in this effort. Setting this significant exclusion aside, the digitization also fails to represent the non-Sunni Islamic heritage of Ottoman Turkey adequately. This paper aims to explain this failure by focusing on the kinds of libraries the collections of which are digitized and the socio-political context within which they were built. The first (and longer) part of the paper introduces the types of libraries one could find in the late medieval and early modern periods in Ottoman Turkey. Most of these libraries were attached to mosques and colleges of law the construction of which, especially starting from the early sixteenth century on, were closely related to a political project that we may call legal imperialism. By sponsoring the construction of imperial colleges of law, transforming the multi-purpose places of Islamic worship to canonical mosques, and building a strict hierarchy of professors of law and judges to monopolize the interpretation of the law with a view to strengthen imperial authority, the Ottomans successfully circumscribed the pluralist potential of Islam in medieval Anatolia and late medieval Balkans. The collections of Ottoman libraries attached to colleges and mosques are a product of this imperial project. The first free standing public library in the empire, the Köprülü Library, was not any different. The second part of the paper makes an attempt to identify the kind of libraries where one could find texts that came to form the Alevi-Bektashi canon. Attention will also be paid to the largely oral nature of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition and the impact of this orality on the underrepresentation of non-Sunni texts in the written heritage of Ottoman Turkish. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of the digitization of Ottoman manuscripts within the increasingly authoritarian political context of contemporary Turkey where Sunni Islam has been assuming a much more visible role in public life during the last decade.