The Mughal and the Safavid empires took shape at the same time and from the same cultural milieu. Yet they are rarely studied together. Divided by area studies that place Safavid Iran in Middle East and Mughal India in South Asia, our understanding of early sixteenth century imperial formation in these interconnected regions remains fragmented. Few have paid attention to the fact that Babur, the "founder" of the Timurid (Mughal) dynastic realm in India, had in his early years served as a vassal to the Safavid Shah Ismail, the Sufi king who claimed to be the promised mahdi (messiah). In fact, Babur had to put on the Twelve-gored "taj" of the Safavid devotees, the Qizilbash (Red Heads) named after the color of their headgear. This signified among other things Babur's accepting Shah Ismail as his pir (spiritual guide). Babur's period of Safavid discipleship is conveniently missing from his famous memoirs due to a gap in the manuscript. This paper examines the effects of Babur's discipleship on the development of Mughal rituals of kingship. Was Humayun's invention of a "taj" for his inner circle, featuring the number seven, a mimicry of Safavid practice and a way to break away from the shame of Safavid discipleshipS Was the later creation of an Akbari royal cult a repeat of this ritual process These are the unexplored questions I take up in this paper. Using a variety of sources such as poetry, painting and royal letters from the Safavid realm as well as memoirs, courtly panegyrics and texts on magic from the Mughal domains, I argue that processes of imperial formation in India and Iran were tightly interconnected in this period as each dynastic realm competed for territory, material wealth and human resources. In this competition, the two nascent empires learned from each other. Specifically, contact with early Safavid politics was critical to shaping later Mughal religious and political policies in India. Thus, a rethinking of early Mughal-Safavid interaction should lead to a rethinking of the classical Mughal period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.