This paper examines the work of Turkish Muslim poet and writer Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983) as one of the first attempts in establishing an Islam-based political project that stands as an alternative to Eurocentric knowledge systems and modes of modernity which were adopted as part of Turkey’s founding ideology. The paper seeks to demonstrate that Necip Fazıl is one of the pioneers of what I refer to as “Islamic decolonial thought,” who developed a Sufi-based intellectual paradigm and a political project in the 1940s. I maintain that Islamic decolonial thought emerged primarily as a reaction to Turkey’s founding ideology, Kemalism, which launched a West-oriented secular modernization project that framed the Ottoman system and Islam as inferior, backward, and uncivilized. My larger project seeks to demonstrate that Islamic decoloniality emerged against this backdrop in the 1940s, and later branched out into diverse intellectual movements that seek to break free from what is perceived as the hegemony of European intellectual paradigms, and the Kemalist project that has been termed as “self-colonization” by some of the Muslim intellectuals. This paper focuses on Necip Fazıl’s work, who is current President Erdogan’s main ideological inspiration, and the founder and lead writer of The Great East journal (1943-1978), which is considered to be Turkey’s first Islam-based political journal that was instrumental in inspiring numerous future political and intellectual movements. In his books, Necip Fazıl provides a critical commentary on Western thought by contesting the reason-faith dichotomy that sustains Western systems of knowledge, and develops an alternative Islam-based model that he refers to as the “Great East Revolution,” which involves the creation of a totalitarian Naqshbandi-based state model and a tightly regulated social order. Based on the analysis of these sources, I argue that while Necip Fazıl seeks to dismantle the reason-faith binary by taking at the base of his political thought a conceptualization of “human” as primarily defined by a Sufi understanding of Islam, his singular and monolithic conceptualization of Islam results in generating the same power relations that are claimed to be the product of the hegemonic status of European paradigms of knowledge, and produces the same kind of totalizing politics attributed to colonialism and imperialism, which persecutes, represses, or silences voices that unsettle the authority of colonial modes of governance. The reproduction of the same binaries and hierarchies that sustain the contested colonial power relations, I argue, is the predicament of Islamic decoloniality.