This paper examines the effects of existentialist philosophy on the prominent Turkish and Islamic intellectual, writer and poet Sezai Karakoç (b. 1933). With his doctrine of revivalism and his unique perspective of what I call an Islamic existentialism, Karakoç remains a pivotal figure when it comes to explaining existentialism from conservative/religious standpoint in Turkish politics and literature. Karakoç is both one of the most significant poets of the Second New movement in Turkish poetry, and an influential intellectual who has put his mark on Turkish Islamism through a project he called “Revival” (Dirili?) based on his writing in the journal of the same name (1960-1992). I argue that his doctrine for Islam’s revival was heavily influenced by the flourishing existentialist thought in the 1950s. Through an analysis of Karakoç’s writings and poems in Dirili? journal and elsewhere, this paper aims to analyze the effects of existentialist thought on Karakoç’s own doctrine of revival in three perspectives. First, the political background of Turkey during the 1950s when Turkish poetry starts to diversify by extending its scope and by opening to foreign influences in response to the ending of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, Turkey’s transformation into a multi-party system in politics, and Turkey’s alignment with the US and NATO will be analyzed. Second, the effects of existentialist thought on Turkish Second New Poetry will be discussed in relation to the polarized atmosphere of the Cold War, and the concerted social and political defiance of young generations in Turkey. The Second New poets were affected by existentialism, surrealism and dadaism, which have appeared during the second half of the 1940s in Europe, and the general depressive mood of the world at the time. Political content of socialist/realist poems was replaced with a multi-layered, abstract and dark imaginary, and an experimentalist and existentialist exploration of self in Second New. Lastly, Sezai Karakoç’s own contribution to Turkish intellectual scene will be analyzed by introducing the term Islamic existentialism as it appears in Karakoç’s own doctrine of revival. In dealing with the question of existence, Karakoç denies the well-established judgement that existentialism is pessimistic, refuses Sartrean atheism or Camusian absurdism to understand the laws of existence, and links both nature’s and human’s reason of existence to a mighty Creator (i.e. God) and the fundamental belief that everything is linked to Him.