Addressing a subject that has hitherto been largely ignored in modern western scholarship, the paper is concerned with the politics of Turkic and its relation to Persian in early modern Iran on the one hand, and with its role in political theology at the time, on the other hand. It focuses on the first half of the eighteenth century, and argues that, in addition to new venues in political ideology, geopolitics and religious politics, the end of the Safavids and the rise of the Afshar also meant experimentation with new language ideologies, i.e., popular assumptions about the social role and prestige of a given language. Analyzing some of the poetry of a largely unknown poet who used the nom de plume “Nash’a,” and drawing on additional evidence from lexicography and archival materials, I will demonstrate that Turkophone litterateurs of the time tried to make connections with what they knew as the two main strands of Turkic literature, the Turkmen and Chaghatay Turkic traditions, which they felt connected them to the tribal traditions of the Qizilbash—the Turkmen who had been the military backbone of the Safavid army—and to the prestige of Timurid culture. Aside from the increased interest on the part of Turkophone literati and their patrons in the poetry of Timurid literati like Mir ‘Ali Shir Nava’i (1441-1501), this also meant a conscious reinterpretation of these Turkic literary traditions and their adaptation to new purposes. In addition to the resurfacing of conversion myths and mytho-genealogies, such as the Oghuznama, that had characterized the period prior to the Safavids, we also see attempts at presenting Nava’i as a Shiite poet, which, although contrary to historical facts, underlines the importance of Turkic literature as part of political theology in the period. On a broader level, the paper will contribute to our understanding of how Turkic as a literary subculture could coexist with the prestigious Persian literary tradition prior to modernity.