Since the conservative Islamist Justice and Development Party came to power in Turkey in 2002, the country’s Alevi community has increasingly been interpellated with the question of whether they are inside or outside of Islam. While some Alevis have considered finding a clear answer to this question to be a prerequisite for successful organization against the threat of assimilation posed by the government and its Sunni Muslim religious officials, others counter that the question itself is a distraction from the work of reforming and reviving Alevi communal rituals centered around music and the achievement of human divinity. In this paper, I examine Alevi attempts to summon a counterpublic around refusal of the debate of Alevis’ status vis-à-vis Islam. What does a counterpublic look like that is constituted through the refusal of debate, rather than participation in it? What are its modes of address, its ethical affordances and limitations, and its political implications? I approach these questions by introducing the problematic of messianism to discussions of religious (counter)publics in the Middle East. Indeed, the reason behind the debate around Alevis’ relationship to Islam is that Alevis practice a messianic form of Islam that suspends Qur’anic doctrines and laws, replacing them with a musical instrument—the long-necked lute (saz) or “stringed Qu’ran”—and an oath of initiation as the basis of a new ritual order. This oath is not a confession of faith in the one true God of monotheism, but a pact sealed by an animal sacrifice that establishes ritual criteria for ethical relations within a community based on the principle of mutual contentment, or rızalık. Yet, as many Alevis migrated from their rural ancestral homelands to Turkish and Western European industrial centers beginning in the 1960s, this oath and the mechanism of communal dispute mediation it fostered were all but abandoned in Alevis’ effort to integrate into national structures of political and economic participation. Drawing upon ethnographic examples of Alevi staged musical performances, I show how contemporary Alevis seek to articulate the memory of this oath and the trauma of its loss in the public sphere. I argue that while these performances summon a nascent counterpublic around the desire for rızalık that renders the question of inside/outside Islam irrelevant, this counterpublic remains limited in scale by an Alevi semiotic ideology that links mutual contentment to human divinity by grounding both in a particular kind of embodied copresence.