The late Ottoman dissident author Namik Kemal (1840-1888) is known to have read the works of contemporary European historians, and is understood to have reflected their influence in his own historical writings. This engagement has traditionally been depicted as a turn away from the Ottoman historiographical tradition and toward a “modern” (read: nationalist) approach to writing history, despite the resonances between these European authors’ approaches and those of classical Ottoman authors, including many regarded as heirs to the Khaldunist tradition. This paper proposes to explore these resonances in an examination of Namik Kemal’s historical writings, focusing on the ways in which both traditions can be seen to converge in Namik Kemal’s broadly sourced accounts of Ottoman and world history. Through an analysis of Kemal’s well-known essays for the journal Ibret, written in 1872, as well as the lesser-known historical writing he undertook in the 1880s, one aim of the paper is to explore the degree to which Namik Kemal can be situated within an explicitly or implicitly Khaldunist tradition. I focus on the ways in which Kemal’s writings reflect a renewed transnational interest in Ibn Khaldun, which manifested in the publication of translations in Swedish and French from 1840 onward and the appearance of printed editions of his original Arabic manuscript in France and Egypt, reflecting the author’s relevance to both Middle Eastern and European scholars. I also wish to place this engagement alongside Namik Kemal’s fascination with the Enlightenment tradition of world history embodied in the writings of the Comte de Volney (1757–1820), as well as the Romantic nationalist historiography of the French author Jules Michelet (1798-1874) and the Italian author Silvio Pellico (1789-1854). By placing these authors in the company of Ibn Khaldun and his Ottoman successors as intellectual resources for Namik Kemal, I consider how dissident historiography became a site for the convergence of the Islamic and European scholarly traditions in the nineteenth century. My analysis highlights how Namik Kemal drew on both these traditions to advance a distinct Young Ottoman agenda of radical political change coupled with robust Ottoman sovereignty.