Through the examination of the AKP government’s initiative to inaugurate the Alliance of Civilization Institute (ACI) at Ibn Haldun University (IHU), this study aims to explore how the (re)conceptualization of the term civilization (medeniyet) by Muslim conservatives led to a new approach to higher education in contemporary Turkey. With Islam’s increasing presence in political and social discourse since the 1990s, the term civilization was reintroduced as the revival of Islamic-Ottoman values, becoming a key term under the new political ideology of the AKP in contestation with the secular, Western values of Kemalism. The political reconstruction of civilizationism was accompanied by the opening of various civilization studies programs under different academic institutes and foundations, and the establishment of new universities around the country in the last decade. At the inauguration of the IHU campus, President Erdoğan stated that Turkey lost its intellectual power due to the “invasion” of Western ideologies and claimed that higher education must be restructured to raise generations in line with Turkey’s civilizational heritage. This statement exemplifies how the term civilization is being used by the AKP to establish a new approach to higher education. In similar speeches by Erdoğan and other party officials, the aim of higher education is stated as the continuity of the Islamic civilization, knowledge, tradition, and heritage in a “modernized” way. This study examines the relationship between AKP’s Civilizationism and the restructuring of institutions of higher education in Turkey. As one of the architects of this restructuring, the founders of the IHU and its first president, Recep Şentürk uses the term “open civilization,” which refers to the need for resurrecting Islamic scientific inquiry in an inclusive, global, and universalist manner, and incorporating it under academic institutions as a new discipline This paper focuses on the founding of ACI and the IHU, which is presented as the pioneering institution of this new type of university and the launching of Civilization Studies as a new field of academic inquiry. Based on the analysis of the speeches, public statements, and other addresses of president Erdoğan and Recep Şentürk during the inauguration of the IHU, I argue that the concept of Islamic-Open Civilization is part of a larger political project of the civilizationist ideology of the AKP and its neo-Ottomanist policies, which restructured the higher education system by bringing back Ottoman Islamic schools of higher education (madrasa) in a modernized, cosmopolitan fashion.