Abstract:

While modernization efforts were going on in the Ottoman Empire, Islamism was one of movements producing notions on how content and limits of modernization should have been. The concept of civilization is one of the most important notions that is centered while producing ideas in the period of searching for the potential of modernization. Early Islamist thinkers had a negative approach to the concept of civilization because of that they thought the civilization and Europe have similar meaning. But later they had an Islamic image on their thoughts by accepting that the concept of civilization has both material and abstract fronts, which technical and technological civilization represents material front, that civilization would be meaningful in line with its source and that is why, the concept of Islamic civilization represents the ripeness form of civilization. Changing and transformation of the approach to the concept of civilizationined until the emergence of the ideas that are European civilization evolved out of the accumulation of the Andalusian Umayyad and in this way, it has Islamic roots, which means modernization is taking own possessions back. From this point of view, it comes out that the discourse of Islamists towards civilization has contradictory character in the period approximately a century long.