From the late Safavid period to the twentieth century, Niʿmatullāhī Shiʿi Sufism developed a sustained reflection on work, discipline, and social responsibility that complicates enduring assumptions about the political quietism of mystical traditions. Ethical treatises, hagiographies, and sermon collections produced by Niʿmatullāhīs repeatedly stress the obligation of the seeker to engage in productive labor and to avoid forms of spiritual authority that might legitimize social parasitism or moral transgression. Manual work is presented not only as a means of subsistence, but as a transformative practice endowed with moral and spiritual efficacy. This discourse emerges in conscious tension with earlier and highly influential figures of the Persian mystical imagination, such as the Qalandar and the wandering dervish, whose antinomian gestures and ecstatic excesses had long functioned as critiques of legalistic religiosity and social convention. While the Niʿmatullāhī order could claim such figures as part of its own symbolic genealogy—embodied by poets, itinerant musicians, and masters often persecuted for their defiance of normative ethics—modern Niʿmatullāhī literature increasingly reinterprets or marginalizes these models. By examining texts spanning the 18th to the 20th centuries, from the legacy of Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī to the reformist teachings of Sulṭān ʿAlī Shāh Gunābādī, this paper argues that the reconfiguration of mystical ideals of labor reflects broader negotiations with changing regimes of authority, moral economy, and social order in Iran. Rather than signaling withdrawal from public life, the insistence on work and self-discipline reveals an esoteric strategy of ethical normalization through which Sufi actors sought legitimacy within emerging modern frameworks of citizenship, productivity, and religious respectability. In doing so, Niʿmatullāhī Sufism offers a case study for rethinking the binary between "quietist" and "activist" Islam.