Music has almost always been an avenue for expressing perceptions of one’s self, a way of expanding one’s experience, a tool for the construction and at times the disruption of values, a flexible, open-ended, and powerful element in the formation of a mixed and complex ethnic and/or religious identity. Music constitutes an important part of religious and political identity among Alevis of Turkish or Kurdish origin in Turkey who have repeatedly been persecuted by military regimes and Sunni religious traditionalists. The relationship of Alevis with the state is complex: They have at times been strongly supported by the secular state in the republican Turkey, yet they were also perceived as a threat by the same authorities. Only by the mid-1990s Alevis began to hold their rituals publicly in the Cemevi. Apparently, new communication technologies triggered the Alevi renaissance of the 1990s and has come to promise a new period of cultural production in transnational space particularly relating to the smooth transmission of knowledge and praxis. Yet there is a gap in the academic literature about how the change of space across time of Alevi rituals and transmission of knowledge have come to influence the identity formation among the Alevi youth. This paper analyses the implications of the usage of space in Alevi rituals from the 1930s to the present. How does the change of space from private sphere to the public realm influence performance of Alevi musicians and their involvement with religion and politics? How do the Alevi youth audience in urban spaces, particularly in Istanbul, respond to that change in the dissemination of cultural production? More particularly, how does space influence the politicization of Alevi youth and impact the kind of melody or text of a particular musician which in turn impacts his/her audience? This paper eventually aims to understand the formation of religious and/or political identity among the Alevi youth across time and space. The methodology for this paper includes observations, questionnaires, interviews, and oral history and where available, demographic and economic data. The interviews for this research are based on an “emphatic listening” paradigm, in which “empathy” shapes the interview process and the role of the listener is to help empty the large reservoirs of emotion, anger, stress, frustration and other negative feelings until the individual can see more clearly.