A neglected aspect of the importation of the institutions and ideologies of European science into the Ottoman Empire is its impact on the perceptions and reconstructions of Ottoman identity in the 19th century. 19th century Ottoman authors wrote many texts on science which they considered the reason behind European progress. A major source of this notion was the books they read on “European civilization” which, exhibiting the influence of orientalism on the historiography of science, acknowledged the contributions of Muslim scientists in Islam’s “Golden Era.” This narrative emphasizes that Muslims constitute the link between antiquity and the Renaissance, but regards Arabs as the representatives of Muslim glory, and Turkish ascendancy as the onset of Islamic decline. We observe in the writings of Ottoman Turkish litterateurs an unease about this narrative particularly after the 1860s. From prominent authors like Nam?k Kemal and Ali Suavi to the anonymous writers of letters to editors, many Ottomans expressed their views on the justifiability of the Ottoman claim to the legacy of the “Muslim contributions to science.” While most authors continued to refer to Arabs as the “Noble People” and espoused the discourse on “the Islamic origins of modern science,” they started to underline that Turks had also contributed to science. Debates about whether scientific texts written in Arabic or Persian could constitute a true legacy for Ottomans, and whether scholars like Ibn Sina and Farabi were Turks, Arabs, or simply “Muslims” – debates that would assume even more significance after the establishment of the Turkish Republic – started in the 1870s. The pinnacle of this period was the publication of Mehmed Tahir’s “Turkish Contributions to Science” in 1898. In this paper, I highlight the particularities and ironies of these understudied debates and show how the encounter with 19th century historiography of science impacted Ottoman debates on identity.