Research on the encounter between Protestant missionaries and the Ottoman state has depicted it as a clash between intractable ideologies. Foreign missionaries caused domestic instability by empowering Ottoman Christians at a time when nationalist movements among non-Muslims threatened to break apart the Empire, and missionaries were the largest source of information to the Western world concerning such events as the 1896 Armenian massacres. Rather than explain the complex political realities of multi-confessional Anatolia, missionaries framed such events as the brutal Muslim persecution of Christians. Overall, they failed to make Christian converts and only succeeded in leaving behind an ideological “Cold War” between different religious groups. Yet historians' emphasis on mutual antipathy is the result of an over-reliance on Ottoman state sources that promoted “orthodox” Sunni Hanefi Islam during the Hamidian period (1876-1909). The state's rhetoric of sectarianism, which labeled Christians and other Muslim confessional groups as potentially seditious, was used to describe policies of state legitimation by fashioning Sultan Abdülhamid II as the champion of Islam, not to accurately describe alternate belief systems. Recently, historians such as Ussama Makdisi have broken away from this model to focus on Ottoman figures who culturally and religiously influenced, and in turn were influenced by, Protestant missionaries. I intend to further this line of research and examine how religious dialectics could even occur in acts of ostensible Islamic piety. For example, Muslim literati produced many anti-Christian religious polemics in the late Ottoman period, but even though the purpose of their endeavor was to defend Islam, these authors quoted freely from Western European biblical scholars. In particular they made use of developments within textual and historical criticism that questioned the doctrines of the Incarnation, the resurrection, and biblical inerrancy.To examine this counter-intuitive phenomenon, I will analyze the polemics of well-known Ottoman authors, particularly Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Fatma Aliye, and explore their appropriation of European scholarship to defend Islam. Muslim intellectuals and American missionaries engaged in a mutually intelligible debate in which both sides shared the same intellectual traditions and schema of religious truth. They both rooted their arguments in Enlightenment philosophy and modernity. The late Ottoman Muslim polemical methodology came from Enlightenment-inspired European biblical criticism, and the Protestant methodology was an Enlightenment-inspired post-millennial eschatology. This was at a time when both groups purportedly were only at loggerheads. Instead, I will show their religious ideas were also shared and discussed.