The paper will focus on texts written by a wide range of Turkish Islamist intellectuals, and the ideologies of religious associations and political organisations in Turkey, to investigate one aspect of Islamist thought about ‘the international’, namely approaches to global history and historiography. These approaches centre on questions of periodisation (the beginning and end of history, major turning points), causation, the idea of change and progress, the connection between past and future, the ‘centre’ of history, and method. The research will be carried out through textual analysis of primary sources, the collection of secondary sources, and fieldwork in Turkey (and other countries, as required, such as Germany and the United States). The paper’s aim will be to outline the evolving and sometimes conflicting approaches to history and historiography in Rpublican Turkish Islamist thought, from 1923 until today. For the most part, in thinking about Islamic history, Turkish Islamists have ascribed a central position to the Ottoman Empire and shown a desire for Turkey, as its successor state, to occupy a leading role. For example, Necip Fazil Kısakürek sought to reclaim an Islam-centred vision of world history through the idea of Büyük Doğu (the Great East). Abdurrahman Dilipak, İsmet Özel and Sezai Karakoç also presented interesting standpoints on questions of history. More recently, Ahmet Davutoğlu and İbrahim Kalın placed the Ottoman Empire and subsequently Turkey at the core of history and at the intersection of ‘East’ and ‘West’. On the other hand, dissenting views, offered for example by Ali Bulaç and Hayrettin Karaman, have taken the early period of Islam as the ideal that should be emulated. The debate between traditionalists and ‘historicists’ will be studied in so far as it is relevant to debates about history. Mehmet Paçacı, Mustafa Öztürk, Seyfettin Erşahin, Recep Şentürk, İsmail Kara and Cihan Aktaş are some additional thinkers whose works will be explored. Drawing on insights from global intellectual history, the paper will situate Turkish Islamist thought within both ‘Western’ and ‘Islamic’ (Arab and South Asian) contexts and show that Islamist thinkers’ approaches evolved in conversation with philosophical and political debates, thinkers and trends in both settings. In doing so, and in exploring what is often presented as a ‘non- Western’ and even ‘anti-Western’ body of thought, the paper will argue that the very categories of ‘Western’, ‘Islamic’ and ‘non-Western’ do not stand up to scrutiny.