A decade ago, Islamic early education centers serving three to six-year-old children became popular in Turkey. These have ranged from easily accessible home-based care with scarce resources devoted to early education together with the teaching of the Quran to minors to fancy and expensive preschools that offered the teaching of foreign languages and numerous extracurriculars, in addition to the teaching of Islamic values. The current government and local authorities allowed, promoted, and coopted these institutions, naming them “community-based education models” or “value-based early education.” To understand how these early institutions expanded with the catalyst of Islamic groups and organizations, as well as the government, I interviewed a total of fifty parents, teachers, NGO representatives, and policymakers in Turkey. I also analyzed statistics, policy documents, NGO reports, and newspaper coverage of education in Turkey. Scholars researching contentiousness in the education sector have shown that contestations over values and norms lead to competition and new institutional forms, including outside of the formal education system. In the Turkish context, the already existing divisions around secular and Islamic education pushed individuals to find their “neighborhoods/mahalle” in the Islamic preschools that are seen as the continuation of the traditional schools, mahalle mektebi, which were shut down during the 1920s modernization, secularization, and centralization reforms. As parents explain, while the cities lose their earlier fabric of the traditional neighborhoods at a setting characterized by sharp contestations and rampant inequalities in the education sector, conservative individuals claim to have found refuge in their culturally familiar yet isolated communities sharing “similar conservative values.” While the lower SES parents prefer Islamic preschools because of a common cultural language or already existing networks in their neighborhoods, middle and upper SES parents actively pursue opportunities for the religious upbringing of their children in line with their values and membership in Islamic groups. At the same time, several local-level governments and the central government also promote conservativism in education and care sectors, in addition to marketization and involvement of non-governmental actors, which furthers the prevalence of Islamic preschools in a context that is defined by limited access to early childhood care and education.