Mainstream historiography treats the Ottomans’ repressive policies against the Kizilbash primarily as security measures taken within the framework of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict. On closer examination, however, the proposition that the repression of the Kizilbash was little more than a series of security measures reveals itself to be not so obvious as it sounds. Evidence indicates a lack of exact correlation between the level of perceived or real Safavid threat and the intensity of Kizilbash surveillance and persecution. That the repression of the Kizilbash represented something more than mere security concerns is also suggested by its profound impact on the fabric of the society. The moral and religious passion of the Kizilbash hunt was so high that in the long-run it established the Sunni-Alevi bifurcation as the most insurmountable socio-psychological cleavage in Turkish society. To fully grasp the Ottomans’ anti-Kizilbash campaigns in the sixteenth-century, one must take into account the larger context of Ottomans’ state-building process and their concomitant efforts to refashion the identities and behaviors of the empire’s Muslim subjects along the lines of Sunni orthodoxy. The persecution of the Kizilbash in this context served a number of tangible and symbolic objectives. First off, it helped in the delineation of the otherwise overlapping and diffused religious boundaries that had existed in Anatolia since medieval times, and as such served as a boundary marker for the “true” Islam for which the Ottomans stood. Their unrelenting struggle against the “heretics” also worked as a convenient device for the Ottomans to accentuate their Sunni identity and their commitment to upholding the rule of Sharia. Finally, the Kizilbash surveillance and persecutions affected a vigilance at the popular level for the observance of Sharia, thereby contributing to the religious homogeneity of the Muslim polity, and also shored up the control of the central authority in the provinces.