While Namik Kemal (1840-1888) is recognized as an important literary figure in late Ottoman history who is still read and remembered in Turkey today, his thought remains poorly understood. The subtleties of his philosophical and political project have not fared well in 20th-century historiography, which preferred to cast him and his fellow Young Ottomans as partaking of the same “modernizing” impulse as the statesman-reformers of the Tanzimat era. Sherif Mardin's 1962 book "The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought" initiated the work of drawing out the crucial differences among these thinkers, and recent work by scholars of both the late Ottoman period and the European Enlightenment have further prepared the ground for a reconsideration of Namik Kemal's legacy. In this paper, I focus closely on Namik Kemal's concept of “natural law,” a concept that illuminates his intellectual bond with both Enlightenment and Islamic thought. Through close readings of several articles he wrote for the journal Ibret (1870-73), I draw out the parallels and divergences between his and Montesquieu's accounts of natural law. To make sense of Namik Kemal's interest in Montesquieu and other French Enlightenment thinkers, I make use of Dipesh Chakrabarty's approach in his 2000 book "Provincializing Europe" and revisit Sherif Mardin's reading of Namik Kemal to argue for a new interpretation of his thought and its significance in late Ottoman intellectual history.