How has theatre become a site for the community-building efforts of the Islamic groups in Turkey and its diasporas since the Cold War? What can Islamic theatre practices in Turkey show regarding the relationship between religion, secularity, and modern theatre as an art practice perceived to be a Western form per se? With its famous genealogy centered on religious rituals, theatre is considered to have a complex relationship with religion. Yet, the popular Western-centric accounts of theatre history often designate theatre’s presence in Islamicate contexts as uneasy, if not antagonistic. In a similar vein, the scholarly practices of theatre historiography in Turkey have mainly kept the Islamic renditions of theatre out of the history and canon of “Turkish theatre.” Islamic themes and discourses have existed in the Western-influenced Turkish theatre since the 19th century. However, the second half of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of theatre groups explicitly identifying as “Islamic,” along with other terms framing their dramatic productions with ambivalent notions of piety, morality, and locality. Theatre, as an art form initially associated with Europeanization in Turkey, became a suitable venue for proselytization efforts and propagation of Islamist visions and utopias, especially during the 1960s when religious movements started to gain power in urban areas. Performing Islamist Occidentalism, some prominent Turkish Islamists envisaged theatre as, at once, the “weapon of the enemy” and an inherently apt form for “Islamic aesthetics.” Combining archival and ethnographic research, this presentation examines the aesthetics and politics of Islamic theatre in Turkey by situating it in the broader debates on theatre and performance in the Middle East.