How did the court and its supporters go about constructing what turned out to be a surprisingly stable Ottoman imperial identity? The palace used many tools, including historical and literary narratives, poetry, and numerous artifacts of material culture. However, during the “Age of Confessionalism” when this hybrid political and religious identity took primary shape, one of the more powerful tools appears to have been kalam texts of religious argumentation. Ibn-i Kemal (d. 1534), also commonly known as Kemalpa?azade, was one of the key players in this respect. In this paper, I will survey Ibn-i Kemal’s kalam texts, placing them in the context of other writers who either participated in the same project, or supplied competing perspectives. Ibn-i Kemal’s kalam contributions are not unknown, as he authored well over 200 treatises defining the prototypical “good Muslim” (often synonymous with “good Ottoman”). Addressing a range of topics as diverse as the definition of apostasy, proof of God’s existence, licitness of zikr and devran, limits of mystically inspired poverty, legal definition of usury, preferences of the Hanafi madhhab, effects of opium, and several dozen others, Ibn-i Kemal offered a detailed opinion on just about any issue of importance for 16th century Ottoman society. In order to place his texts in context, I will compare his writings against those of certain rivals and colleagues who wrote on related or identical topics, including Mü’eyyetzade, Sar? Gürz Hamza Efendi, Zenbilli Ali Cemali, Sünbül Sinan, Shams al-Din Jahrami, and Idris-i Bidlisi. Through a broad reading of the articulation of imperial religious culture expressed in these texts, I hope to sound out the driving forces, social parameters, and intellectual justifications behind the construction of an Ottoman Muslim imperial identity in the early 16th century.