Ismail Gelenbevi is one of the most prolific scholars in eighteenth century Ottoman Istanbul, with more than thirty works in many disciplines including kalām (Islamic theology), logic, mathematics and astronomy. Being a madrasa professor, as well as a mathematics teacher at the naval engineering school established in 1775, and also having written on both Islamic scholarship and early modern science, he represents a transitional figure in Ottoman education between the already existing scholarly traditions, primarily represented by the madrasa, and the newly emerging system of knowledge in the Ottoman territory mainly based upon the engineering-oriented European science. This dual character of Gelenbevi seems to have led later authors of bibliographical and other secondary works to emphasize on one aspect of his scholarship over others. In this context, a striking example is the scholarship of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, a famous Ottoman statesman and scholar, who wrote well known chronicle work, Tarih-i Cevdet in the nineteenth century. This work, though acknowledging Gelenbevi’s success in the madrasa sciences, focuses heavily on his achievements in early modern mathematics and engineering. This paper aims to deal with the meaning of the way Gelenbevi is narrated in Tarih-i Cevdet, given the fact that the period during which Ahmet Cevdet Pasha wrote his chronicle can be characterized by the increasingly impact of the European systems including the political and the scientific, upon the Ottoman Empire, as well as by the efforts made by the Ottoman political and intellectual elites in the nineteenth century to respond to the European challenges they faced. I will argue that Tarih-i Cevdet’s narrative on Gelenbevi not only shows the Ottoman elites’ interest in mathematical and engineering knowledge transmitted from Europe as necessary assets for strengthening the state, but also shows how they retrospectively construed the legacy of a learned man of this era as being one of rivalry with respect to his European counterparts.