In Turkey there is a tendency in the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) for staking a claim on civilizationism as a means of an anti-colonial struggle. On political level, AKP also uses an Islamic and neo-Ottomanist civilizational discourse and presents it as an indigenous alternative to Western civilization. However, there has been substantial opposition within the IIF itself against the use of the word civilization (medeniyet), among which İktibas journal, published since 1981, takes the lead. The paper examines how this prominent dissident Islamist publication has been criticizing the presentation of idea of “Islamic civilization” as a decolonial and indigenous alternative to Western civilization. Since defining both socio-political and Islamic concepts within the original ideological and historical context has been the essential concern of the journal since its inception, İktibas published several articles and even a special issue, in recent years, that addressed the debate on civilization, taking a critical stance against the use of the term civilization within an Islamic context. From the perspective of İktibas, the intellectual hegemony and epistemic colonization of the West cannot be defeated via using Western-originated concepts, which is why the journal depicts “Islamic civilization” phrase is an oxymoron at best. The objective of this paper is to show that civilizationism has not been adopted by all Islamist intellectuals. I argue that İktibas’s contestation of the Islamic civilizationist discourse revolves around the journal’s claim of the deceptive Islamic appearance of the concept of civilization. I draw on recent debates on decoloniality to analyze Iktibas’s opposition as an example of decolonial critique due to its anti-Western and anti-Eurocentric stance on a conceptual and epistemic level. In addition, I reveal that Iktibas seeks to create an alternative non-Western paradigm based on Islam. Basically, I focus on the issues of the journal published between 2016 and 2022 to track debates around the concepts of civilization, Islamic civilization, coloniality and Western intellectual hegemony.