In 2016, praising the introduction of a new course on Ottoman ahi (craft) guilds in Karatay University in Turkey, a journalist wrote that this economic heritage gave access to the “hidden codes of our civilization,” and argued that the revival of the ahi model was as a necessary step for “solving our problems by returning to our own cultural values.” This account exemplifies, how, the revival of ahi (Ottoman craft guilds) is understood as an essential element of Turkey’s civilizational revival. In this perspective, ahi guilds are claimed to provide an indigenous, authentic, and Islamic model for governing economic affairs, ranging from the organization of business associations to the management of customers, and from pursuing economic growth to establishing a balance between the haves and the have-nots. 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 ahi heritage was a form of restoring the Ottoman-Islamic civilization. This paper maps this intellectual field formed around the debate on the significance of ahi guilds and its relation to civilizationism, with an eye towards understanding the origins, claims, and themes of Ahism, and examines what these components tell us about the origins and limits of AKP’s larger civilizational politics. First, I demonstrate that attempts to revive this economic heritage are often expressed from a decolonial sensibility, often aligning reimagined features of the Ottoman-Islamic economy in opposition to the West. Ahism is promoted as a model of Islamic “small business” that combines free market principles with religious values and communitarian principles, and an alternative to Western economic institutions, practices, and theories. Second, I discuss the internal debates within this Islamic intellectual field particularly concerning disagreements about the scale of production and the proper management of class-based conflict. I substantiate this argument through a close reading of Ahism-related publications of the Turkish Trade Ministry, Chambers of Arts and Craftsman, and the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey; promotional materials printed as part of Ahi week celebrations, speeches given by AKP politicians in the past two decades, as well as publications—written by Muslim intellectuals as well as others—that criticize AKP’s discourse of Ahism from an Islamic standpoint.