Istanbul Şehir University (ISU) was founded in 2008 by a group of Muslim intellectuals with the support of the AKP government. It was celebrated by Islamic circles as a step aimed at breaking the monopoly of a West-oriented approach to higher education that took Western academic modes and standards as the universal norm. However, after a decade-long span of being seen as one of the most successful examples of alternative knowledge production in higher education and inspired several other universities, ISU was dissolved via a presidential decree of Erdoğan in 2020. This paper argues that ISU represents a case of what Mustafa Özel, one of the prominent founders of ISU, calls "obedient resistance”. Being a scholar in economics and a prolific writer, Özel means by obedient resistance a repudiation of every form of domination by not refusing to benefit from the outcomes of it while at the same time resisting its hegemony. He specifically takes the position of non-Western societies against any form of colonial domination and defines obedience in reference to the attitude of benefiting from any Western-origin thing from ideologies, quality standards, or educational institutions, to literary genres, sources of knowledge, or the organization of social life. Resistance, on the other hand, refers to a struggle to maintain one’s authenticity and distinctive features as a manifestation of a desire not to be defined by others, particularly by the West. This paper seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Özel’s notion informed the structuring of ISU, in the institutionalization of its academic departments, curricula and course contents in social science disciplines. I argue that there is double obedient resistance in the case of ISU. The first one reveals itself as an epistemic struggle against West-centric education within an academic structure that was designed as a Western-style university which cares to meet Western quality standards. The second form of obedient resistance was performed against AKP’s hegemonic interventions: ISU refrained from AKP's attempts aimed at instrumentalizing ISU’s religious identity and putting it at the full service of political ends. Within the framework of this argument, I focus firstly on the founding principles of the university and the course contents of social sciences departments to reveal the indicators of the obedient resistance against standardized West-centric contents. Second, I examine public statements of both the founders of ISU, and AKP officials to demonstrate the ways in which ISU obediently resisted AKP’s hegemonic interventions.