Samiha Ayverdi (1905-1993) was the charismatic Sufi shaykha of the Rifai Order. However, she was more famous in Turkey as a novelist, poet, and public intellectual of the Conservative Far-Right movement of the Cold War era. She also founded several civil society associations dedicated to the preservation of the classical Turkish-Islamic heritage in literature, fine arts, music, and architecture. This paper will examine how Shaykha Ayverdi imbricated the discourses and practices of classical Sufism with the local politics of Cold War Turkey. Founded at the end of the 19th century by an Ottoman state elite named Kenan Rifai, the Turkish Rifai order is an upper-middle-class gender-mixed Sufi tradition based in Istanbul. It is currently led by an unveiled female shaykha named Cemalnur Sargut who inherited the order from Samiha Ayverdi, the female successor of Kenan Rifai. Today, Cemalnur Sargut promotes Sufism as the only global language that can unify people around the world. Likewise, her predecessor Kenan Rifai openly displayed an inclusive attitude towards the ethnoreligious minorities of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire by welcoming them in his personal life as close friends and in his Sufi lodge as disciples. Despite the universalist attitudes of her predecessor and successor, Samiha Ayverdi exhibited public hostility toward the Armenian, Greek, and Jewish communities of Turkey in her writings. Her nationalist far-Right politics during the Cold War period resulted in her exclusionary stance against not only the minorities but also the Leftists, the Islamists, and the positivist Kemalists of Turkey. Rather than preaching universal Sufi ethics of love, acceptance, and unity, she romanticized the “Turkish Islamic tradition” represented by the colonizing frontier dervishes of the 11th century who Islamized and Turkified Anatolia. Why did Samiha Ayverdi abandon the universalist aspirations of Sufism? How did Cold War politics in Turkey influence her reformulation of Rifai Sufism? What are the implications of the inconsistencies, if not outright contradictions, within the same lineage of the Turkish Rifai order? How can the contemporary Rifais see the Cold War period as a part of seamless continuous tradition rather than a rupture?