Since the early 2000s, Turkish conservative and Islamist intellectuals have advocated a new foreign policy discourse relying heavily on a new interpretation of the country’s history and identity prioritizing its imperial heritage and its centrality in the Muslim world. Ahmet Davutoğlu and İbrahim Kalın — both as academics and as policy-makers — have contrib uted to the reshaping of Turkish foreign policy and its legitimacy discourse during the AK Parti era. This paper intends to examine firstly the evolution of the idea of Empire in Turkish Islamism and conservatism and secondly Davutoğlu and Kalın’s reading of Turkey’s impe rial magnificence in the general framework of Turkish Islamism and conservatism. More over, it also aims at understanding how and when Turkish conservatism and Islamism have reformulated the country’s identity and relation with Ottoman heritage. This paper attempts to demonstrate also that global events and social transformation have certainly influenced intellectuals’ perception of themselves. However, the shift from Turkish-Islamic synthesis to an Ottoman-Islamic synthesis has been promoted by a new generation of academics — to which both Davutoğlu and Kalın belong — who since the early 1980s worked to uncover the Ottoman past that, allegedly, had been dismissed by Kemalist dominant ideology. Thus, new research accompanied by the desire for taking revenge has promoted this new image of the self among Turkish conservative and Islamist intellectuals. Despite these two authors’ influence, this paper will argue that their role in shaping Turkish foreign policy is limited.