The religious transformation in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire has been largely examined in the context of growing religious tension. With a particular focus on the influence of Kadizadeli preachers in the Ottoman capital, themes such as Islamization, conversion or confessionalization have dominated scholarly perspectives on the Ottoman attitude towards religious diversity. However, my examination of various Muslim writings on the non-Muslim faiths reveals that the Ottoman conception of religious diversity was far more complicated. Historical accounts, polemics and theological works, which have until now largely been regarded as products of confessional polarization, can also be dealt with as signs of growing Muslim scholarly interest in those faiths, cultures and histories. In these written works that were produced between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century, efforts to historicize the non-Muslim faiths and reimagine interconfessional boundaries are particularly salient. Authors writing in various cities of the empire, including Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus, engaged in debates around the question of how to conceptualize the non-Muslim faiths and differentiate them from Islam based on historical, theological and legal perspectives. As responses to this question, while many Muslim intellectuals emphasized interconfessional differences, others were primarily interested in common features between Islam and the other faiths. In this paper, focusing primarily on inclusivist approaches to religious diversity in a period that has long been portrayed as the “triumph of fanaticism,” I aim to show that Ottoman attitudes towards religious diversity were highly diverse and changing. In examining this revival of interconfessional themes, I will address the role of intensifying exposures to growing scholarly knowledge about the non-Muslim faiths in these changing attitudes, and how those intensifying exposures might have pushed the Ottoman authors to reframe their conceptualization of other faiths. Travelers, converts and diplomats, as the agents of scholarly exchanges, helped the Ottoman writers to cultivate an intellectual curiosity not only about relatively familiar Christian and Jewish cultures, but also various non-Abrahamic faiths. In addition to offering a revisionist reading of the religious transformation in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire, this study calls for a reconsideration of the Muslim perceptions of religious others in a context broader than the legalist and largely ahistorical framework of “dhimma” or “People of the Book”.