Analyzing the Journal of Islamic Civilization (İslam Medeniyeti-JIC), published between 1967 and 1982, this paper aims to understand debates around civilization as a key concept in Muslim intellectual responses to the discourse of modernization in Cold War Turkey (c. 1960’s-1980). The JIC is one of the first instances when the term “Islamic civilization” was publicly used in Turkey. Through a discussion on the conceptualization of civilization in the JIC, this paper seeks traces of the Muslim appropriation of the concept of civilization by adopting a genealogical approach to the concept. Building on the literature on decolonial thought, the paper argues that the JIC represents one of the earliest examples to Turkish-Muslim reactions and critique of the notion of modernization as westernization adopted by the founders of the republican regime since 1923. Although Turkey was never colonized, JIC authors perceived westernizing reforms of the republican regime as part of a process of Muslim people’s colonization. The defense of “Islamic civilization” in the JIC was a response to Turkey’s westernization as an ostensible “self-colonizing” act as well as the Western/imperial discourse on Islam, which was informed by colonialism and Orientalism. While civilization was hitherto used in singular as a universal phenomenon to refer to a series of technological developments and socio-political institutions devoid of any religious, national, or local connotations, Muslim intellectuals around the JIC started to use civilization in the plural to refer to different variations of an “Islamic civilization” that competes against or is superior to Western civilization. This paper focuses on how the JIC spearheads the emergence of civilizational thought in Turkey by adopting and re-defining the concept from an Islamic perspective, which was once an abstract Western category with claims to universality, to signify a different meaning that helps fighting with universality claims of Western modernity. How did the JIC authors define civilization? How did they conceive “the West” in relation to Islam? What kind of Islam they enunciate by adopting a notion of multiple civilizations (and modernities) in the Cold War context? While the paper acknowledges JIC authors’ effort to find their own voices qua Muslims in the modern world against Orientalist and modernist claims; the paper also aims to show how the JIC made its own boundaries by (re)defining Islam as a civilization, which disregards non-Muslim contributions to Islamic thought and excludes diverging voices within the Islamic Intellectual Field.

Through a qualitative analysis of the works of Sezai Karakoc (1930-2021), a modernist poet and Muslim-conservative intellectual, this paper locates civilization-centered Islamic intellectual thought that arose in Turkey by the 1960s. Karakoc is the first intellectual during the period to use the concept of civilization systematically as part of what can be deemed as the rise of contemporary Muslim conservative political thought in Turkey. He is arguably one of the most important literary (The Second New Poetry Event) and political (Dirilis Thesis) figures in the post-1950 period. He has been an influential name who had a significant impact on the development of different political movements and ideologies in the Islamic intellectual field including the ruling JDP (AKP)’s civilizationist policies. He developed his civilization-centered ideas through Dirilis Journal published intermittently between 1960-1992; books published by his own Dirilis Publishing; and the Dirilis Party, of which he was the founding leader. This paper argues that through his Diriliş Thesis, Karakoc suggests an alternative Islamic civilization approach to capitalism and socialism under the conditions of the Cold War. This Thesis which calls for a massive Islamic rebirth proposes Islam as the third way that has the highest potential for Muslim societies due to its authenticity and civilizationist transformation in every field made possible by the Dirilis methodology. It refers to remembering the essence, finding oneself, confronting the past, and coming out new and afresh into the future. Returning to oneself by remembering essence means “cultivating humanization in the real sense, from deep personality roots to the fabric of society, in the soil of its own civilization”. Karakoc sees such a process as the beginning of the rebirth phase. Karakoc sees Dirilis as a way of life that cannot be concrete if it is deeply operationalized in society. This paper mainly argues that Diriliş Thesis is the programmatic offer of the civilizational approach of Sezai Karakoc. It respectively inquires Karakoc’s civilization (medeniyet) definition; bases his works within “modernity crisis” contextuality; and links them to his Dirilis Thesis that addresses moral, social, and political rebirth in the Islamic sense. The paper will methodologically analyze the relevant texts spread throughout the books of Karakoc.

Islamic literature in Turkey has become the central axis of Islamic political thought from the 1950s onwards. During this period, a newly emerging class of poets, novelists and playwrights contributed to the reinvigoration of Islamic intellectual movements in Turkey with a completely new agenda that broke away from late Ottoman thought . They formulated an influential critique of Western modernity, which eventually turned into an attack on the official Westernizationist modernization project. As the founder of one of the pioneer literary journals of the period, Edebiyat (Literature) published in 1969-84, Nuri Pakdil is one of the leading intellectuals from this group who holds sway over contemporary Islamic political thought and particularly left-leaning Islamic ideologies in Turkey. This paper scrutinizes the anti-Westernist approach in Nuri Pakdil’s literary work and investigates the intellectual genealogy of his notion of Islamic civilization as an alternative to the secular modernization project. He has been the vocal exponent of the idea of the revival of what he claims to be Islam’s authentic civilization and a fervent critic of putative Western civilization. This paper examines Pakdil’s civilizational thought and his critical conceptualization of the relation between Islam and the West to demonstrate what has been grouped under “Islamism” is in fact contending intellectual movements that have taken on different approaches to Islam and its relation to the West. By analyzing his articles that were mainly published in Edebiyat, I argue that civilizational thought promoted by Pakdil in engagement with Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim intellectual movements, was developed as a leftist-inspired Islamic alternative modernity project to Westernization, which uniquely positioned him as a bridge between the nativist and internationalist interpretations of contemporary Islamic thought in Turkey. Based on an analysis of how the concept of civilization is debated in his writings, this essay argues that Nuri Pakdil attempted the production of counter-knowledge what he framed as “nativist thought” that seeks to dismantle perceived coloniality and to open up an alternative epistemological stance. His unique approach which stands for a fusion of internationalist language of Islam and nativist aspects of Turkish-Islamic political thought articulated around the concept of Ottoman-Islamic civilization offers a new epistemic delinking in order to challenge the Westernizationist interventions of the secular state. Nuri Pakdil’s civilizational thought thus can be taken as an example of how the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey strives to move beyond the criticism of Western modernity by reconstructing subalternized knowledges.

The concept of civilization has been widely debated in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey since the 1950s with the goal of conceptualizing civilization in Islamic terms as an alternative to the singular and Eurocentric conceptualization that has it is roots in Western epistemology and was championed by the modernizing Republican elite. The concept is closely tied to notions of urban and the city, which is evident in the Turkish version of the term medeniyet that is derived from the Arabic word medina, meaning city. In the contemporary Islamic intellectual field, many prominent names joined the debate on the relationship between civilization and city, marking a shift in civilizational thought that can be interpreted as the urban turn. In this paper, I examine how Lütfi Bergen, a prolific and controversial figure known for a heavily traditionalist-Islamic criticism of modernity, and his books such as The Moral Uprising, Underdevelopment is Superiority, or Civilization-The Construction of Muslim Communitarianism, develops his understanding of civilization in relation to the city. Bergen offers a unique contribution to this debate by making a distinction between two concepts şehir, which stands for a place where life is organized in accordance with the social, political, and economic practices of Medina at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, in short, the Sunnah, and kent, which is where Western materialist culture prevails at the expense of Islamic tradition and denotes the failure of modernity in organizing urban life. Bergen establishes an immanent connection between şehir and civilization by defining civilization also in relation to the Sunnah and severs its ties to Western epistemology. The literature on decoloniality describes such efforts of delinking from Western epistemology as epistemic disobedience. Further, Bergen states his aim as to create an Islamic epistemological basis through which Muslims can discuss social, political, and economic matters in their own terms, and develops an urban model for a Muslim community. By doing this, Bergen reclaims civilization as a singular Islamic concept, differentiating himself from many figures in Islamic intellectual field who are for the idea of the multiplicity of civilizations. I argue that, by studying Bergen’s work, it is possible to unravel a part of the complexity arising from clustering together the intellectual accounts criticizing the epistemic dominance of the West. The part presenting how Bergen’s understanding of civilization conflicts with his contemporaries attests to the diversity in the Islamic intellectual field.