It has been widely accepted in the scholarship that the Ottoman Sunnism had been consolidated vis-à-vis the Shi’ite Safavid state thanks significantly to the agents like Kemalpaşazāde (d. 1534) and Ebussu`ūd (d. 1574), two of the most significant chief jurisconsults in the sixteenth century. They are being held responsible for enforcing the Sharia in everyday life and bringing it in line with the dynastic law through their fatwas and epistles. Although their legal opinions (fatwas) did indeed have a deep impact on the social and political life in the “classical age” of the Ottoman Empire, their scholarly works could hardly be reduced to the outcome of an endeavor to shape public religiosity and politics. Their intellectual pursuits lay out much more complex engagements with various bodies of knowledge and had a particular leaning on textual criticism of the past authorities on the grounds of a meticulous philological study. Far from appropriating and enforcing orthodox positions in the tradition of the legal school, their methodology was informed by the ways of verification (tahqīq), meaning exposing truths and errors buried in the texts by means of logical reasoning. This textual undertaking also seems to have been informed by their vast erudition in the Arabic language theory and rhetoric, which enabled them to address the textual problematics. In my presentation, I will bring in Kemalpaşazāde’s “correction” (ıslâh) to one of the classics of Hanafi legal canon, Burkhan al-Shari‘ā’s Wiqāya, in order to shed light on this philology-oriented methodology in legal reasoning. I will attempt at problematizing the picture of the Ottoman muftis as the upholders of an orthodox tradition by looking into the textual criticism directed by Kemalpaşazāde to Wiqāya tradition, in order to shed light on how Ottoman legal thought was configured on the discursive level through rhetoric and philology.