Islamic literature in Turkey has become the central axis of Islamic political thought from the 1950s onwards. During this period, a newly emerging class of poets, novelists and playwrights contributed to the reinvigoration of Islamic intellectual movements in Turkey with a completely new agenda that broke away from late Ottoman thought . They formulated an influential critique of Western modernity, which eventually turned into an attack on the official Westernizationist modernization project. As the founder of one of the pioneer literary journals of the period, Edebiyat (Literature) published in 1969-84, Nuri Pakdil is one of the leading intellectuals from this group who holds sway over contemporary Islamic political thought and particularly left-leaning Islamic ideologies in Turkey. This paper scrutinizes the anti-Westernist approach in Nuri Pakdil’s literary work and investigates the intellectual genealogy of his notion of Islamic civilization as an alternative to the secular modernization project. He has been the vocal exponent of the idea of the revival of what he claims to be Islam’s authentic civilization and a fervent critic of putative Western civilization. This paper examines Pakdil’s civilizational thought and his critical conceptualization of the relation between Islam and the West to demonstrate what has been grouped under “Islamism” is in fact contending intellectual movements that have taken on different approaches to Islam and its relation to the West. By analyzing his articles that were mainly published in Edebiyat, I argue that civilizational thought promoted by Pakdil in engagement with Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim intellectual movements, was developed as a leftist-inspired Islamic alternative modernity project to Westernization, which uniquely positioned him as a bridge between the nativist and internationalist interpretations of contemporary Islamic thought in Turkey. Based on an analysis of how the concept of civilization is debated in his writings, this essay argues that Nuri Pakdil attempted the production of counter-knowledge what he framed as “nativist thought” that seeks to dismantle perceived coloniality and to open up an alternative epistemological stance. His unique approach which stands for a fusion of internationalist language of Islam and nativist aspects of Turkish-Islamic political thought articulated around the concept of Ottoman-Islamic civilization offers a new epistemic delinking in order to challenge the Westernizationist interventions of the secular state. Nuri Pakdil’s civilizational thought thus can be taken as an example of how the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey strives to move beyond the criticism of Western modernity by reconstructing subalternized knowledges.