The Rifaiyye is a gender-mixed, upper-class Turkish Sufi order founded in the late nineteenth century. The Rifais have transformed the Islamic gender discourses by recognizing the ontological egalitarianism of the sexes in Islam and women’s greater capacity for spirituality. They have disrupted Islamic gender norms by discarding bodily modesty codes, such as veiling and gender segregation, and by extending women’s public participation to the level of community and spiritual leadership. Women have always been at the forefront of the Rifai movement. One of them, Samiha Ayverdi, inherited the order in 1950 upon Rifai’s death. Ayverdi was not only the first female Sufi master who led both men and women in Turkey, but also a renowned novelist, poet, and public intellectual of the Turkish conservative Right during the Cold War era. She published over 40 books. She also founded several prominent civil society associations dedicated to the preservation of the classical Turkish-Islamic heritage in literature, fine arts, music, and architecture. In 1966, she established one of the first associations for women in Turkey named the Turkish Women’s Cultural Association (TURKKAD) with an aim to mobilize elite women to become active social agents in the public sphere. Ayverdi may have been seen as a progressive modern Muslim woman thanks to her status as an unveiled female Sufi master and public intellectual leading educated middle-class men and women (Ayturk 2019, Ayturk and Mignon 2013). However, I complicate the picture of women’s empowerment mapped on her female leadership by closely examining Ayverdi’s oeuvre and civic activities. Strongly refuting feminism and the Western discourse of women’s rights, Ayverdi valued women not as autonomous individuals, but as a class of mothers tasked to reproduce the ideal nation and rehabilitate Turkish-Islamic culture. Hence, she echoed the early Republican illiberal “state feminism” which emancipated women in public while simultaneously deflecting feminist consciousness and independent activism. In this paper, I historically and socio-politically situate Ayverdi’s ideological thought in Cold War Turkey. I demonstrate how she co-imbricated Sufism with the Right-wing anti-communist and nationalist values by tying the idea of serving God into the idea of one’s duty and obligations to the nation. I finally examine how her nationalist conservatism, elitism, and etatism prevented her to endorse the feminist ethics of gender equality since she associated the empowerment of women only with a public mobilization for a greater cause of national defense against communism, westernization, and cultural alienation.