Recently, Ottomanists have applied the confessionalization paradigm to the Ottoman sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and argued that the Ottoman Empire partook in the European confessionalization as the Ottoman court increasingly succumbed to an exclusive and aggressive interpretation of Sunni Islam. Accordingly, important developments of the period are interpreted as religiously motivated undertakings. Most recently, for instance, a historian called the Vienna campaign of 1683 the “failed final jihad.” The comparative use of the confessionalization paradigm in Ottoman historical context is welcome, but certain qualifications are in order. First, confessionalization is a well-documented theme in early modern Europe. Propaganda through written texts and hymns, preaching, censorship, and architecture were common across Europe during the age of confessionalization; together they reached to the effect of a widespread social phenomenon. In the Ottoman context, however, several narratives of conversion and catechisms, notwithstanding their significance, simply do not amount to a confessional age. Historians need many more and diverse evidences from across the empire to articulate an Ottoman confessionalization. Second, once such evidence is demonstrated, causal links have to be detected between decision-making processes and purported confessional movements. In confessional Europe hundreds of individuals affiliated with different denominations were actively involved in confessional policies of monarchs. In addition, in mainstream European historiography the age of confessionalization—along with absolutism and Enlightenment—are believed to have set the stage for the emergence of modern state. Accordingly, early modern states and churches have cooperated in strict observation of social and economic behaviors such as obedience to religious rules or payment of taxes. Over centuries, the ‘European master narrative’ continues, these obligations have gained fully secular character and sidelined divine duties, resulting in the emergence of centralized states. Thus, the confessionalization paradigm is one of the building-blocks of progressive European narrative. In Ottoman historical context, however, the concept has so far conveyed a pejorative tone. Negating its explicative origins, it is used to present the Ottoman Empire almost as a malevolent fanatical project. My paper is based on several seventeenth-century pamphlets and authoritative German and English publications on confessional Europe which are ignored by the proponents of Ottoman confessionalization. I emphasize historiographical problems arising from the direct transfer of confessionalization paradigm to the Ottoman historiography. I argue that the current use of the concept carries the risk of reorienting Ottoman historiography into another declinist and ‘neo-orientalist’ pattern.