Since Faleh Abdul-Jabar and Hosham Dawod’s seminal volume “Tribes and Power” (2003), which focuses heavily on Iraq, interest in the revival of tribalism in that country from the 1980s and 1990s to the present has steadily increased. After Abdul-Jabar’s first comprehensive article on the Arab Socialist Baʿth regime’s deconstruction and reconstruction of tribes (1968–2003), very few studies have analyzed the exact mechanisms of this process and its consequences for Iraq's tribal landscape. In discussions about tribes in Iraq, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (sāda, as they are called in Iraq) are hardly mentioned, although entire tribes among Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, i.e. hundreds of thousands of Iraqis claim Prophetic descent. The Prophet's descendants are usually interpreted as a kind of religious status group whose neutral position outside the tribes enabled them to function as mediators in tribal conflicts. But how is it that so many of them are considered tribes today? This contribution investigates the tribalization and bureaucratization of Prophetic descendants by the Baʿth regime in Iraq using the example of a special sub-group among them, namely al-sāda al-rifāʿiyya (the descendants of the Sufi saint sayyid Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī who died 1182 in Southern Iraq). This distinct genealogical subgroup emerged at the end of the Ottoman Empire through the networks of the Rifāʿiyya Sufi brotherhood and is still important in Iraq’s tribal landscape today. Drawing on social anthropological theories of kinship in modern nation-states (S. McKinnon), my analysis of Iraqi genealogical literature since the 1960s and a newly available Baʿthist state census of the Prophet’s descendants in 1999 will show how the regime bureaucratized “acts of kinship” (M. Lambek), thereby institutionalizing and categorizing al-sāda al-rifāʿiyya and other Prophetic descendants as tribe(s). As part of the regime’s politics towards tribes and its religious politics, it reestablished a state-controlled Syndicate of the Prophet's Descendants (niqābat al-ashrāf) in the Ministry of Interior, which was responsible for the legal control, official registration and authentication of all the Prophet's descendants in Iraq. As this policy also aimed to assign a new missionary role to the sāda as moral exemplars for the purification of society from religious radicalism, I argue that the state-sponsored resurgence of tribalism in Iraqi society must also be interpreted in light of the general Islamic resurgence in the country and the region as a whole since the 1970s.