Muḥammad Taqī Majlisī (d. 1659) was a prominent Akhbārī Shī‘ī scholar whose Sufi tendencies has been a matter of heated debate since his time until now. He is claimed, in some Safavid sources, to have been a Sufi affiliated with the Nūrbakhshīyya order, a sympathizer of Abū Muslim, and an advocate of the Sufi practice of audition; a view upheld by several premodern pro-Sufi works as well as some modern pieces of scholarship on the issue. The opposite view, on the other hand, also has its own proponents, mostly among the Shī‘ī jurists, who have completely dismissed Majlisī’s Sufi inclinations, citing primarily the words of his well-known son, Muḥammad Bāqir (d. 1699), that the former’s endorsement of Sufism was merely a technique for attracting the Sufis in order to ‘guide’ them. Our thorough investigation, in this paper, of Muḥammad Taqī Majlisī’s involvement in Sufism demonstrates that the narratives in the primary sources in favor or dismissal of his pro-Sufi tendencies should be looked at with serious reservations, as most of them seem to have been purposefully designed to convey a certain picture of him in the midst of the Sharia-minded jurists’ anti-Sufi campaign during the Safavid period. In other words, we have shown in this essay that the widely-cited arguments of Sayyid Muḥammad Mīrlawḥī (d. 1676) on the one hand, and those of Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī on the other hand, respectively for and against Muḥammad Taqī Majlisī’s being a Sufi, were essentially shaped by the massively different personal relationships that each of these two figures had with Shaykh Muḥammad Taqī as well as their striking, yet different, roles in the attacks against Sufism. And given the serious unreliability of these two accounts (which have dominated the majority of subsequent times’ sources), our study of Majlisī the Father’s Sufi inclinations extends to an in-depth textual analysis of his own works along with an investigation of a wide range of Safavid chronicles, tadhkiras, works of ṭabaqāt, and most importantly bio-bibliographical sources, which altogether show that his situation with Sufism was a highly complex one. This study will offer new insights into the Safavid-period anti-Sufi campaign in general, and sheds light on some understudied aspects of the background to the deterioration the Sufi-Shī‘ī interrelations in the late Safavid period.