Over the course of the sixteenth century, Ottoman Islam underwent a significant transformation. Whereas in previous centuries many inhabitants of Anatolia and the Balkans had taken a liberal view of Islamic belief and practice, sampling freely from elements perceived today as Shiite or even Christian, as the empire matured, various actors began to place a greater emphasis on what they took to be proper Sunni Islamic belief and practice. Scholars have often viewed this shift as the result of a top-down process by which the Ottoman state began taking a greater interest in managing the religious lives of its subjects. This paper seeks to complement this focus on the state by considering the role of a different set of historical actors, namely the Arab scholars who joined the Ottoman Empire after the conquest of the Mamluks in 1516-7. It argues that in the sixteenth century, under the influence of their Arab colleagues, Ottoman learned men intensified their engagement with the sunna. It was this shift as much as any other that contributed to Ottoman ‘Sunnitization’. Although too little is still known about Ottoman interest in hadith, existing research suggests that certain aspects of prophetic tradition generated less excitement in fifteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia than they did in Mamluk Syria and Egypt. This seems to have changed in the sixteenth century. This paper examines the growing Ottoman interest in hadith transmission, a key scholarly and devotional practice by which prophetic accounts were passed from one generation to the next. The paper focuses on two mid-century ij?zas in which Arab scholars granted their Ottoman colleagues permission to transmit certain hadiths. These licenses and the larger culture of which they were a part, the paper suggests, resulted in a new ‘hadith consciousness’ among the Ottoman imperial elite. In addressing these issues, the paper underlines the importance of studying the so-called ‘post-classical’ engagement with hadith; indebted as this engagement was to earlier developments, it was no less dynamic.