In the secularist-nationalist historiography of Ottoman modernization, the persistent continuity of religious aspirations and establishments posed a major enigma for reductionist binary categories, above all, modern/progressive vs. traditional/backward. Imagining religion as a primordially conservative phenomenon that was not only in direct opposition to modernity and modernization but also destined to stay perfectly unaffected by it, secularist historiography expected religion to disappear totally from the public sphere leaving in its place pure reason, and its handmaiden science, which supposedly would be the sole criterion for truth, good life, and good government. This secularist-nationalist reading of Ottoman modernization and science presents at least two major problems. First, it reifies Islam as an essentially static accumulation of dogmas and rigid institutions rather than approaching it as a living cultural tradition. As an enduring and vibrant tradition, Islam proved its ability to rearticulate its teachings, modify meanings attached to its practices, render its institutions more functional under new circumstances, and consequently convince its practitioners to keep attached to primordial loyalties. Secondly, the Eurocentric tone of the narrative of modernization reveals a stylized, and hence distorted, picture of European history, insofar as the religious and the secular are inevitably, continuously in conflict with each other. Recent studies challenge both conclusions. For instance, in European history, natural theology played a vital intellectual role in harmonizing science with religion. Similarly, natural theological trends in Islamdom, whether in its Christian or Muslim form, played a comparable role. Far from being simple obstacles to the triumph of modernization, natural theology, especially in its popular forms, projected the responses of two sister civilizations to the challenge of a world historical phenomenon. This paper will explore such popular Ottoman science journals from the second half of the nineteenth century (esp. 1860s-1880s) as Mecmua-i Fünun, Mecmua-i İbretnüma, Mir’at, Hadika, Hafta, and it will specifically focus on the uses of natural theology in the pages of these journals. Thus, it hopes to demonstrate how the Islamicate civilization responded to world historical phenomena by drawing on its own resources and finding its own solutions in conversation with the Western civilization. It proved to be a productive conversation, one that finally helped to indigenize modern science. Neither subterfuge (‘the invention of tradition’) nor apologia does justice to the transformation of Islamicate civilization in the modern world. It was much more complex.