During the Ottoman Empire’s reform period (1839-1922), an epochal shift took place in the practices and discourses of work and productivity. Ranging from bureaucratic reforms that targeted laziness and pushed for work efficiency, to the new awareness of time made visible through clock towers, Ottoman society experienced this shift in their day-to-day lives. Morality books, an old genre that had new incarnations in the nineteenth century, became one of the sources in which this shift was formulated. With more than 100 morality books published in the nineteenth century, I shall present on how morality books transformed its content in the hands of modern and at times modernist Ottoman authors in the nineteenth century. As the empire went through a nation-and-state formation process, these authors popularized modern modes of thinking about work and laziness, the productive body, and time efficiency, articulating normative dimensions of citizenship. Morality authors, with the experience of new practices that made them re-conceptualize their knowledge categories, frequently referenced a symbolic universe, whose sources also included “Islamic knowledge.” These authors fortified their argumentations by advancing Qur’anic verses and sayings of the prophet. Moreover, they adamantly opposed a set of beliefs and practices that they identified as handicaps for productivity by declaring them un-Islamic and anti-progress, and thus anti-modern. Therefore, some morality books presented the campaign for work and against laziness as one for the betterment of religious life, articulating what can be called an ‘Islamic work ethics.’ Could this phenomenon in popularized discourses of morality be seen as merely a Western content filling in the Islamic forms? More specifically, how would examining morality books as cultural products enable us to understand the connection between Islamic discourses and establishing modern and moralizing narratives, especially about work ethic of citizenry? While this endeavor itself produced a specific tradition of a modernity project historically tied to the Ottoman experience, it also shaped and transformed dynamics of the knowledge fields as it has been produced in the Ottoman context. The assumption that Islam and modernity are mutually exclusive does not explain the wealth of Ottoman experience. This presentation attempts to explore the question of religion and modernity by engaging with a very specific historic context and sources.