Analyzing the Journal of Islamic Civilization (İslam Medeniyeti-JIC), published between 1967 and 1982, this paper aims to understand debates around civilization as a key concept in Muslim intellectual responses to the discourse of modernization in Cold War Turkey (c. 1960’s-1980). The JIC is one of the first instances when the term “Islamic civilization” was publicly used in Turkey. Through a discussion on the conceptualization of civilization in the JIC, this paper seeks traces of the Muslim appropriation of the concept of civilization by adopting a genealogical approach to the concept. Building on the literature on decolonial thought, the paper argues that the JIC represents one of the earliest examples to Turkish-Muslim reactions and critique of the notion of modernization as westernization adopted by the founders of the republican regime since 1923. Although Turkey was never colonized, JIC authors perceived westernizing reforms of the republican regime as part of a process of Muslim people’s colonization. The defense of “Islamic civilization” in the JIC was a response to Turkey’s westernization as an ostensible “self-colonizing” act as well as the Western/imperial discourse on Islam, which was informed by colonialism and Orientalism. While civilization was hitherto used in singular as a universal phenomenon to refer to a series of technological developments and socio-political institutions devoid of any religious, national, or local connotations, Muslim intellectuals around the JIC started to use civilization in the plural to refer to different variations of an “Islamic civilization” that competes against or is superior to Western civilization. This paper focuses on how the JIC spearheads the emergence of civilizational thought in Turkey by adopting and re-defining the concept from an Islamic perspective, which was once an abstract Western category with claims to universality, to signify a different meaning that helps fighting with universality claims of Western modernity. How did the JIC authors define civilization? How did they conceive “the West” in relation to Islam? What kind of Islam they enunciate by adopting a notion of multiple civilizations (and modernities) in the Cold War context? While the paper acknowledges JIC authors’ effort to find their own voices qua Muslims in the modern world against Orientalist and modernist claims; the paper also aims to show how the JIC made its own boundaries by (re)defining Islam as a civilization, which disregards non-Muslim contributions to Islamic thought and excludes diverging voices within the Islamic Intellectual Field.