Concentrating on a number of works by the noted litterateur and painter, Sadiqi Afshar (d. 1018/1609-10), the paper seeks to place Turkic literature in Safavid Iran against the background of the Persianate “Republic of Letters” and early modern state formation in the 16th-17th century Islamic World. As is well known, the Safavids came to power at the head of a largely Turkoman tribal confederation (the Qizilbash) and it was to the latter that most of the popular messianic Turkic propaganda poetry was dedicated. However, the Safavids were also heir to the Timurid tradition, and as part of that, some of their Turkoman Qizilbash elite perpetuated both the Persian and the Turkic literary traditions of the Timurids. A case in point is Sadiqi Beg, who came from one of the Qizilbash tribes and wrote works in Persian, Azeri Turkic, the language mostly used under the Safavids, as well as Chaghatay Turkic, the prestige idiom practiced under the Timurids; he emulated Ali Shir Nava’i, the most important figure of the Timurid and Chaghatay Turkic literary traditions, who in his well-known pamphlet entitled Muhakamat al-lughatayn, produced a language ideology for Turkic as part of a political theology in the late 15th century. The paper argues that the late Timurids and the Ottomans had a veritable early modern language ideology, something similar to the ones produced in 15th-16th century Europe, where Latin was giving way to vernaculars. However, Turkic had no such function under the Safavids. It never disappeared from Persia, but it disappeared from Safavid ideology. Sadiqi thus strove for a lost cause with his Turkic endeavors when Abbas I (1587-1629) introduced large-scale centralizing policies and the Qizilbash lost much of their power. At the same time, I also argue that unlike the Ottoman and Mughal context, where there were Turkish and Persian language ideologies as part of political theology, no such assertion of its status could be seen in the case of Persian in Safavid Persia. Jettisoning their explicitly messianic tenets, the Safavids espoused the ideology of Persian kingship as conveyed by the Persian literary tradition, and they sponsored primarily Persian, spreading Twelver Shiism among the populace at large. However, contrary to the Mughal and Ottoman cases, under the Safavids, there was no reassertion of language as part of a new political theology, and thus there was never competition between Persian and Turkic.