It is tempting to read the Allah-Muhammad-Ali doctrine as simply a folk version of Twelver Shia veneration of Ali, and the two traditions do share deep roots, but the doctrine does not reproduce Twelver theology. Twelver Shia Islam structures its doctrine of authority around the Imamate, a line of twelve infallible Imams descended from Ali, each divinely designated to lead the community and interpret revelation after Muhammad. Alevi and Bektashi devotion venerates Ali intensely and often names the Twelve Imams in its liturgy, but it does not organize communal authority around a living clerical hierarchy descended from that line the way Twelver Shia Islam does, and it folds Sufi vocabulary of divine unity into the doctrine in a way classical Twelver theology does not.
That mixture is part of why the doctrine, and the traditions built around it, sit awkwardly inside a simple map of Sunni and Shia Islam. Turkey's state religious authority, the Diyanet, has historically classified Alevism as a cultural variant within Islam, while some Alevi organizations and a body of academic scholarship, including work examining how the category of Turkish Alevi Islam was itself constructed by state and scholarly actors over the twentieth century, argue that Alevism functions as a distinct tradition folded into Islam more by classification than by theological fit. The Allah-Muhammad-Ali doctrine sits at the center of that argument, because it is the clearest point where Alevi and Bektashi devotion visibly departs from both mainstream Sunni Islam, which honors Ali as the fourth rightly guided caliph and nothing more, and mainstream Twelver Shia Islam, which venerates him within a different doctrinal structure entirely.