Who holds religious authority in Turkey? Which political actors contest for the support of Turkish citizens for religious leadership? The results of an original online survey conducted by Yougov with 1992 Turkish respondents on matters of religious authority shed light to these questions. This paper identifies different sources of religious authority in Turkey utilizing the quantitative results of this survey, delineates Islamic left’s opposition to AKP’s authoritarian Islamism by qualitatively examining Ihsan Eliacik’s works, and assesses the social support Ihsan Eliacik and pro-AKP figures hold based on the survey results. It is easy to characterize the Islamic public sphere in Turkey as monolithic due to the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) hegemonic status in the religio-political sphere in the country. Despite this common (mis)perception, however, there are religious authorities that challenge AKP’s hegemony in the Islamic public sphere. Ihsan Eliacik is one such religious scholar who embraces pluralistic, egalitarian, and tolerant interpretations of Islam and challenges AKP’s authoritarian Islamism which recently turned more exclusionary and nationalistic. Eliacik is influential in numerous social movements, platforms, and networks that can loosely be defined as the Islamic Left (Koca 2014). As such, focus on Eliacik and more broadly the counterhegemonic discourses created and circulated by him and the Islamic Left in Turkey on numerous issues, including minority rights, women’s empowerment, religious pluralism, freedom of expression and corruption—is instrumental to understanding the nuances of Turkey’s Islamic public sphere, its multivocal character, and the ideologies of the religious opposition in Turkey, particularly in their contrast with the AKP. In what follows, the paper first summarizes the results of the YouGov survey and present how much credibility and trust Turkish citizens attribute to different public figures as sources of religious authority. The second section examines the Islamic political philosophy of Ihsan Eliacik and delineates his pluralist, egalitarian, and democratic interpretations on various issues and how these challange AKP’s authoritarian Islamism. Lastly, the survey results are utilized to map AKP sympathizers’ views on significant issues, such as religious tolerance, belief in religion’s multivocality, corruption, democracy, gender equality, and the role of religion in politics, and compare them to supporters of religious opposition in an attempt to understand whether and how Eliacik’s liberal democratic Islamic ideology resonates with his social base.