The Rifaiyye is a Turkish Sufi society founded by Kenan Rifai at the end of 19th century, and currently led by an unveiled female sheikha Cemalnur Sargut. The Rifai tradition has been irrevocably transformed in parallel with the modernization processes since late Ottoman era by reforming their Sufi practices and institutions, while maintaining their Sufi mores on spirituality, personhood, and community. They reformed Sufism by divorcing its moral foundation from the traditional ceremonial Sufi practices like dhkir and institutional structures of Sufi lodges, which were deemed as disposable means for cultivating ethical subjectivity. They have founded numerous civil society associations that aimed to preserve the Turkish cultural heritage in the areas of classical Turkish music, art, architecture, language, literature and history. The current shayka Cemalnur has unprecedentedly initiated academic enterprises on Sufism by organizing international symposiums, endowing university chairs in the University of North Carolina in the US and Peking University in China, as well as establishing Sufi Research Institutes in Kyoto University in Japan and Uskudar University in Turkey. The fact that a Sufi master founded the first academic Sufi research institute under a secular university in Turkey illustrates the ways in which Sufism became not only more acceptable in popular culture, but also re-gained legitimacy and prestige as it is now carried into academia in secular Turkey where Sufism is still legally banned. It also challenged the monopoly the Divinity Schools in Turkey on the academic studies of Sufism. Rather than following the traditional Sufi structure of a sacred space of tekke, people now started to receive certificates and graduate degrees on Sufism in a secular university and expanding their knowledge in Sufi tradition without necessarily declaring loyalty to a specific brotherhood. What happens to the status of Sufi identity when articulated in the academic settings? How does the institutional reform and the change of pedagogical settings inform the ways in which the Rifais cultivate their Sufi subjectivity? What is at stake in carrying a spiritual doctrine and practice into the modern positivist setting of the academia? How does a prescriptive normative Sufi discourse is taught by a non-academic Sufi sheikh in the critical and scientific setting of academic classroom?