As Turkey’s first Islam-based, non-Kemalist ruling political party, the AKP and its political stance has been widely discussed since its founding in 2002. After reviewing this debate, this paper examines the notion of “Islamic Conservatism” in contrast to Islamism, as the basis of the AKP’s foundational ideology. Even though Islamism is commonly used to refer to all sorts of Islam-based political movements and ideologies, a closer look at its more informed usage reveals that it refers to an intellectual and political movement which started in the late-nineteenth century to empower Muslim populations against colonialism and imperialism by undertaking radical change based on modern interpretations of the Qur’an. While there were elements of Islamism in the ideological makeup of the AKP’s predecessor, Refah Party, the AKP itself was never really Islamist in this sense. This paper argues that the AKP’s ideology can more accurately be defined as the Turkish version of conservatism, which upholds a sense of community based on civilization as opposed to the ‘ummah’ preferred by Islamists, has close ties with the Nakshibendi Sufi orders in contrast to the anti-Sufi stance of the Islamists, and locates its intellectual roots in traditionalist Islamic philosophy, contrary to the modernist, reformist or even progressive leanings in contemporary Islamist thought. Drawing on these elements, this paper seeks to demonstrate that civilizationism functions as an Islamic-conservative alternative to Kemalist-Turkish nationalism by providing a sense of community that defines Turkey as the cradle of Ottoman-Islamic civilization and offers an alternative sense of national history that includes the 1000-year Seljuk and Ottoman past, which was ousted by Kemalism. Other elements of civilizationism include Islamic modernism, defined as the restoration and advancement of Ottoman civilization, and Islamic capitalism, defined as a form of Islamic neoliberal developmentalism, both of which were thoroughly debated and developed throughout the 1990s among Islamic intellectual circles and came to constitute the foundations of the AKP’s conservative ideology. This paper focuses on the notion of civilization as it was developed in select Islamic-conservative publications and research centers, with a particular focus on BISAV (Foundation for Science and Arts) and its main publication, Divan: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, which were founded by Ahmet Davuto?lu, who was Turkey’s 26th Prime Minister, and one of the architects of the AKP’s Ottomanist-civilizationist policies.