In the early fifteenth century, in Tire in western Anatolia, one ‘Abdülmecid Ferişteoğlu compiled, translated, and expanded upon some the Persian writings of Fazlullah of Astarabad, founder of the infamous Hurūfi (‘Lettrist’) religious sect. These writings, especially the Habname, an extensive record of Hurufi dream interpretations, are rich in social detail. Ferişteoğlu thus leaves us a vivid written trace of the activities and ideologies of this secretive, ‘heterodox’ community’s Anatolian branch. From Ferişteoğlu’s writings one can discover, first of all, the shape of the Hurufi diaspora expanding from Timurid Iran. According to Ferişteoğlu, the Hurufis of the Aydinid cities were evangelized by members of Fazlullah’s inner circle, who looked westward in the aftermath of the founder’s execution in 1394 and found success preaching to disaffected the west Anatolian ‘ulama like ‘Abdülmecid. Perhaps more importantly, Ferişteoğlu’s dream manual reveals how this sectarian community’s unique model of spiritual advancement, as well as its idiosyncratic soteriology, supported a specific social hierarchy and also dictated a particular relationship to the Aydinid and Ottoman political presences. In particular, the Hurūfis’ ‘immediatist’ concept of salvation – in which the totality of the divine promise is immanent in the conjunction of the physical human form with the twenty-eight primordial hurūf (‘letters’ or ‘words’) - centered the community to an extreme degree on the hermeneutic authority of the long-dead Fazlullah Astarabadi, while offering a way to bypass both silsila-style models of authority and Sufi-inspired devotional practices. This ideology, critical of ‘alim, sultan and Sufi alike and based on a private interpretive tradition, thus seems to resemble the Isma’ili da’wa more than a fifteenth-century tariqa. Ferişteoğlu’s writings may then offer a way to move beyond the tariqa model when theorizing how small, esoteric religious communities operated in a setting increasingly controlled by a powerful alliance of the Ottoman state and Hanafi academic culture. The Anatolian Hurufis, beyond their direct influence on the Bektaşiyya, may contextualize contemporaneous sectarian groupings of the Eastern Mediterranean - such as the movements of Şeyh Bedreddin and the Hellenic philosophical circle of Gemistos Plethon – whose activities have long been recognized as central to the development of early Ottoman (and late Byzantine) intellectual culture, but whose actual organization and ideology have remained unclear.