This paper proposes to study the doctrines of the nineteenth-century Sufi leader, Shaykh Khalid (1776-1827), his brotherhood, the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya, and their influence on the intellectual life in the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and 1830. I am interested in the intellectual milieu and methods of organization that led to the rise of the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya and other Muslim movements of reform during the early nineteenth century. In particular, I hope to explain why rival Muslim reform movements in the Ottoman Empire were unable to match the success of Shaykh Khalid and his followers. Indeed, Khalid’s brotherhood spread rapidly among ethnicities and peoples as diverse as Kurdish tribesmen, Damascene Arab merchants, and senior Ottoman officials. By analyzing the correspondence of Shaykh Khalid, his writings and poetry, the writings of his followers, hagiographies, court records and imperial edicts, I will show that the success of the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya rested on Khalid’s ideological flexibility and ability to appeal to far more audiences simultaneously than any other Muslim figure of his era. The roots of his broad appeal were his multilayered identity, his promise to bring Islamic practices in line with the religion’s highest ideals, and his denial that the current moment is fully real. He also emphasized that the various crises afflicting Muslims reflected their misguided “devotion” to the temporal world, or dunya (materiality), as opposed to the hereafter, or din (religious devotion). While it is true that Khalid may have employed bigoted views at certain points in his career, far more critical to his appeal was his status as a powerful Muslim saint and his emphasis on the central role of women in the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya. Finally, I hope to begin a process of reframing how scholars look at intellectual trends during the first third of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, a period which is often wrongly seen as identical to the later periods of the nineteenth century when European power was omnipresent. In reality, Ottoman peoples and their leaders were aware of Europe’s growing power but did not believe (as many would later would) that the Empire’s problems were sufficiently dire that they required a reform program based on Western models. Instead, Khalid’s reform program and other non-Western models appeared to offer viable paths to revive the Empire and to better meet the needs of its many peoples.