This paper introduces the main framework and concepts of the two panels titled “Civilizationism and Islamic Decolonial Thought in Turkey - I and II,” which are part of a larger project that seeks to explore and map Islam-based intellectual movements and political ideologies by studying the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) in Turkey through an examination of leading periodicals specializing in political thought published since the 1990s. The project approaches the IIF as a diverse field of political theorizing that consists of dozens of publishers, non-academic institutes and associations that publish hundreds of periodicals from a wide variety of Islam-based political perspectives. This paper first introduces the main camps within the IIF that are defined by one or a combination of three main approaches to Islam: The rationalist Koran-based approach, which produces political projects based on current-day adaptations of the Koran; the traditionalist Sunni (hadith-based) approach, which produces projects that seek to restore practices and intellectual traditions from the time of the Prophet through the Ottoman times; and the Sufi approach, which cultivates a sense of political and/or social morality based on the Sufi notion of being on a path of love of God. Second, the paper focuses on how civilizationism is developed as part of what can be termed as “Islamic decolonial thought,” which refers to intellectual movements in the IIF that seek to defend and empower Turkey and/or Islam against what is perceived as the hegemony of European paradigms of knowledge and the “self-colonizing,” Westernizing, secularist reforms of the Kemalist Republic. This paper discusses how the term civilization is used by different intellectual and political movements, including the ruling AKP, as the key element of their ideological stance. The goal is to demonstrate that the debate on civilization is marked by a motivation common to all contending parties in the IIF to develop Islam-based political perspectives that debate and develop solutions to Turkey’s domestic or international problems, most of which are defined in relation to Westernization, Eurocentric modernization or imperialism. Building on a critical reading of postcolonial theory and current debates on decoloniality and the decolonization of knowledge, I argue that civilizational discourse is part of Islamic decolonial thought, which can broadly be defined as an attempt to produce non-Western forms of knowing and theorizing that build primarily on Islamic intellectual and theological schools of thought, but also on secular-Ottoman/Turkish as well as Western intellectual traditions.