After Edward Said, Orientalism has started to be discussed as a Western way of patronizing the representation of the Orient or a political device of Western imperial and colonial interests. Orientalism as an academic field, therefore, has been treated as a scholarly domain producing information and an epistemological base for European control over the Orient. The Orient has often been regarded as rather a passive recipient of what was produced within this hegemonic discourse while the question of how “the Orientals” responded to European Orientalism has often been missed in this portrayal. This paper examines both Ottoman diplomatic response and scholarly presence in the International Congresses of Orientalists, a landmark institution of academic Orientalism, and aims to answer how the Ottomans experienced these congresses and how they positioned vis-à-vis European Orientalism. Taking the participation of Ottomans in the International Congresses of Orientalists to its center, this paper contends the idea that academic Orientalism was solely a European product. Instead, I argue that Ottomans engaged in an active dialogue with the Western production of academic knowledge through participating in International Congresses of Orientalists in both diplomatic and scholarly levels since the first congress that was held in Paris in 1873. Utilizing a wide range of sources from Ottoman diplomatic correspondences and scholarly articles dealing with academic Orientalism to personal accounts of the Ottoman participants, this paper illustrates how these congresses became a venue to establish a complex and reciprocal dialogue between Ottomans and European Orientalists. On the one hand, these congresses have been monitored closely by the Ottoman diplomats to control the knowledge production about and image-making of the Ottoman Empire both locally and internationally. For the Ottoman diplomats, these congresses provided an international setting not only to fight against the European imperial interests but also nationalist movements among the Empire’s own confessional communities. As for the Ottoman intellectuals who participated and delivered papers, including the leading intellectuals of the period like Ahmed Vefik Pa?a (d. 1891), Ahmed Midhat Efendi (d. 1912), Ali Suavi (d. 1878) and Ahmed Agaev (d. 1939), these congresses became an arena of not only intellectual exchange but also for contributing to academic knowledge production.