This contribution engages with discussions about hierarchy and social status in the period of transition from the late-Ottoman Empire into post-imperial settings. It takes the example of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (seyyid, pl. sadat) as a starting point to explore how members of a highly privileged group, to which access was closely monitored from both within the group and by the Ottoman authorities, dealt with sociopolitical changes in the late-19th century and subsequently navigated the end of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of secular and nationalist political orders in the region. It is of particular interest in this regard to trace and understand strategies that individual actors and communities relied on in their attempts to translate former status, privileges and resources into newly emerging contexts. The late-19th century correspondence that the highest representative of the seyyids in the Ottoman administration, the nakibü’l-eşraf in Istanbul, exchanged with community leaders in the provinces provides detailed insights into network structures and illustrates demands that were made from within the seyyid community. It emerges from these documents that already during the Ottoman reform period of the late-19th century, seyyids felt the need to safeguard existing privileges, notably with regard to taxation, exemption from military service and their representation in the provincial councils. In addition, the dossiers of the nakibü’l-eşraf permit to identify individuals in different Ottoman provinces who stand out as spokespersons of the local seyyid communities. The second part of the paper takes its cue from there, making use of local archives from Ottoman Syria with an emphasis on the region of modern-day Jordan to follow-up on these individual trajectories from the late-19th into the early-20th century, thus joining the view from the Ottoman central administration with a biographical approach that zooms in on local actors and their strategies in claiming and affirming status. These cross-readings of administrative discourses and local case studies add nuance to existing research into post-imperial transitions, pointing to a continuum and a lively back-and-forth of negotiations about privileges that begins already in the late-19th century, rather than a sudden transformation and complete devaluation of seyyid status after the end of the Ottoman Empire. A focus on actors and their strategies highlights attempts of translating a variety of former status markers – e.g. naming practices and titles, privileged access to resources and restricted bodies of knowledge or social standing, religious charisma and political influence – into new contexts.