Sunni-Shiite polemics form a large discursive tradition within Islamic letters, one that continues to be salient at present and is arguably a major factor in fostering sectarian prejudice, discrimination, and persecution in many regions of the Islamic world. Secondary scholarship has not yet attempted to map out this complex tradition for the reader, though Abd Allah al-Hasan has gathered many such texts from the Twelver Shiite tradition in his four-volume Munazarat (“Disputations”; 2006). The issue of the Imamate looms large in that tradition, but it would be wrong to reduce the confrontation between Sunnis and Shiites to a conflict over the Imamate, as Henri Laoust did in Les schismes dan l’islam (1965), even though many famous polemical works, such as al-Allamah al-Hilli’s (d. 726/1325) Nahj al-sidq, focus entirely on the Imamate. In this study, I examine a number of sixteenth-century polemical texts, both Sunni and Shiite, in an attempt to sketch the specificities of Sunni-Shiite polemics during the Safavid period. These are, on the Shiite side, Ali b al-Karaki’s (d. 940/1534), Nafahat al-Lahut, Husayn b. Abd al-Samad al-Amili’s (d. 984/1576), Munazarah ma`a ba`ḍ `ulama’ Halab, and Mukalamah-yi Husniyyah and Risalah-i Yuhanna, both attributed to Abu al-Futuh al-Razi (d. 12th c.) but probably written in Safavid Iran in the mid-sixteenth century; and on the Sunni side, al-Nawaqid by Safavid minister Mirza Makhdum al-Shirazi (d. 995/1587), who defected to the Ottomans, al-Barahin al-nawaqid by the Syrian Sunni jurist Ma`ruf al-Sahyuni (d. 975/1567–68), and Shamm al-`awarid, by al-Qari’ al-Harawi (d. 1014/1605–6), a native of Herat who sought the patronage of the Uzbeks in Bukhara. An examination of these works reveals 1) the relative downplaying of the issue of the Imamate; 2) focus on the institution of the legal school, rather than the Imamate, as a defining characteristic of the two sides; 3) focus on the issue of cursing the Companions; 4) the Shiite use of Shafi`i legal literature in order to denigrate the Hanafi legal tradition; 5) the connection of sectarian polemics with jihad; and 6) focus on arriving at a verdict of kufr “unbelief” as a means to justify jihad. Other prominent features include the recourse to personal, even hidden, experience and the use of various techniques of dramatization, including the production of fictional accounts, both in order to convince the audience and to create a compelling text.