One of the key claims of the AKP’s civilizational discourse in Turkey has involved an emphasis on the “revival” of Ottoman-Islamic economic institutions. Among these, ahism (Ottoman guilds) have been frequently referred to as an indigenous, authentic, and Islamic model for governing economic affairs. Reviving the Ottoman ahi heritage is argued to potentially improve a variety of issues, ranging from the organization of business associations to the management of customers, and from the delivery of economic growth to the establishment of a balance between the haves and the have-nots. In this vision, the ahi heritage has been marked as one that successfully combines Islamic values and capitalist ethics, therefore presenting a local/indigenous alternative to the Western economic system. Despite this portrayal, the seemingly liberatory discourse of ahism, however, has often operated to justify AKP’s politics of Islamic neoliberalism with negative implications about class relations, economic inequality, and the alleviation of poverty. In the past decade, the AKP regime and pro-government business groups, civil society organizations, think-tanks, and higher education institutions in Turkey have disseminated similar claims about ahism, promoting the view that reviving the socio-economic heritage of ahism was akin to the restoration of Ottoman-Islamic civilization. But the state-sanctioned definition of ahism has also been fiercely criticized by various actors and groups within the Islamic intellectual field. This paper maps these criticisms with an eye towards understanding the points of contestation about the economy among Islam-based perspectives in Turkey. Specifically, I focus on two dissident Islamic intellectual groups: the Labor and Justice Platform (Emek ve Adalet platformu) and Insubordinates (Itaatsiz). Both groups question AKP’s reading of Ottoman ahi heritage by pointing out its inconsistencies and power-laden assumptions. Further, they provide alternative interpretations of Ottoman-Islamic economic heritage by borrowing from leftist and anarchist currents of thought. Analyzing these alternative readings of Ottoman-Islamic economic heritage is the paper’s primary goal. Evidence is drawn from a close-reading of Ahism-related publications of these two Islamic intellectual groups published since the early 2010s.