While it has long been recognized that by the beginning of the eighth/fourteenth century the constellation of social crises precipitated by the Turco-Mongol irruptions of the mid-seventh/thirteenth century had come to frame new conceptualizations of group and self in the urban landscapes of the central and eastern Islamic lands, certain vectors of religious change in the period have yet to be adequately analyzed. A desideratum in this regard relates to the emergence of the major tariqa-lineages, or “Sufi orders,” in this period, a phenomenon whose meaning and import cannot be adequately understood through the compartmentalizing evolutionary models which have heretofore framed much of the scholarly discussion of the subject. Recognizing both the historiographical and analytical utility of approaching the issue with attention to the discursive and performative interplay between the legacy of the eponym of a tariqa-lineage and that of the generations which followed, this paper looks to probe a telling doxological moment in the history of one such tariqa-lineage, the Rifa'iyya, a tariqa-lineage associated with the charismatic Sufi teacher of southern Iraq, Ahmad al-Rifa'i (d. 578/1182). Bringing under consideration the relevant synchronic and diachronic processes attendant to the construction of a definable Rifa'i identity in the first part of the eighth/fourteenth century, the paper looks to provide an analytic model for understanding a key element related to the emergence of the major tariqa-lineages more generally: the khirqa, or “Sufi frock,” as a central organizing concept therein. This model will be presented through an examination of an important, yet heretofore not well treated, Rif??i man?qib composed by the Rifa'i scholar Taqi al-Din al-Wasiti (d. 744/1343), the Tiryaq al-muhibbin (“The Lovers’ Cure-All”). Much more than a hagiographic exaltation of A?mad al-Rifa'i, the Tiryaq al-muhibbin looks to programmatically map him and, by extension, the Rifa'iyya within a much wider network linking past to present. Using the symbolically powerful institution of investiture with the khirqa as an organizing concept, in linking an imagined past to a living present in such a way so as to position the lineage as relevant to the context of social life in late-medieval urban communities, Wasiti’s text discloses important dynamics related to the emerge of self-reflexive tariqa-lineages in the central Islamic lands in the eighth/fourteenth century, dynamics in which the organizing concept of the khirqa played a prominent role.