Islamicate exploration of the natural world developed from and alongside earlier Mediterranean, African, Indian Ocean, and Central Asian traditions. The intellectual vibrancy of early Islamicate scientific work has been credited to this expansive world, as attested to by practitioners in these earlier periods as well as more recent scholarship. By the Ottoman period, imperial expansion and translation of works into multiple Islamicate languages was again central to addressing the problem of “knowing nature” but it was also done with self-conscious awareness of this longer Islamicate scientific heritage and equally self-conscious attention to competition and collaboration with European states. Despite their connected histories, ongoing scientific exchange, many shared practices, and the common role of exploration in both European and Ottoman projects to “know nature” in the 17th – 20th centuries, terms and distinctions in the classification of knowledge differed in these two cases. Where Natural History and Natural Philosophy were important intellectual and social distinctions in European contexts, Ottomans primarily distinguished between al-‘ulum al-naqliyya wa-’l-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya. By the 13th century, this formulation of al-‘ulum al-naqliyya wa-’l-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya was the most commonly-used expression to distinguish two broad categories of knowledge in Islamic terms. Although the precise boundaries of these divisions fluctuated and various fields received more or less attention in different historical contexts, these two general categories distinguished knowledge authorized by revelation (al-‘ulum al-naqliyya) from knowledge authorized by rational investigation (al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya). In these systems, al-‘ulum al-naqliyya, conventionally translated as the “transmitted” or “traditional” sciences, depended on appropriate interpretation and transmission of reveled material. Al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya, generally translated as the “rational” or “reasoned” sciences, depended on human perception, speculation, and reasoning. Biographical dictionaries and manuscript archives evidence marked attention over the 18th and early 19th centuries to what both ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1753-1825 CE) and Muhammad Khalil al-Muradi (d. 1791 CE) called al-‘ulum al-ghariba -- a significant subgroup of al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya. Patrons, teachers, students, instrument makers and scribes actively cultivated their expertise in a range of mathematical, medical, astronomical and divinatory subjects. Traces of these individuals, circulating texts, commentaries, and their interrelationships may be analyzed to help us better understand the social and intellectual significance of these fields in the century prior to large-scale European conquest in the Middle East and North Africa.