The Ottoman nineteenth century—the empire’s “longest century,” to borrow one historian’s phrasing—witnessed a series of seemingly unending upheavals. These included rebellion, famine, war, and massacres. The reform projects that aimed to resolve the myriad challenges produced by these upheavals transformed how Ottoman subjects interacted both with one another and with the imperial state. This paper will look at Armenian-Kurdish relations at the empire’s eastern edge as part of an effort to explore those transformations in the context of a larger contentious imperial politics. In so doing it will uncover points of inter-communal competition and cooperation that the source base is loath to concede. As is well known, religious confession mediated imperial subjects’ interactions with official bodies of the Ottoman state. The series of arrangements that facilitated those state-subject interactions was once called the millet system. Less acknowledged, however, is that the religious institutions of confessional communities embedded subjects in a larger politics of difference. Communities ultimately wove one another into the fabric of the imperial polity through the ensuing relationships between that this system promoted. As part of its effort to reorganize the empire during the reform period, Istanbul bid to unmake many of the connections that had stitched together an earlier iteration of imperial society. Actors on the ground responded by attempting to forge new networks into which they could integrate their communities and institutions. This paper therefore analyzes how Naqshbandi Sufi networks proliferated throughout the Kurdish periphery, displaced Qadiris and, in the process, redrew the communal boundaries between Kurds and the Armenians with whom they shared eastern Anatolia. The paper brings together a multilingual and multilocal archive, culled from Armenian, Ottoman, American, and British sources, that describes the changing contours of inter-communal interactions without ever articulating it as such. The web of connections these documents unwittingly illuminate will help us think beyond the state or the local when investigating inter-communal relations in the nineteenth century.