The prophetic lineage of the famous Hanbali scholar ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1166), namesake of the Sufi brotherhood Qādiriyya, was disputed early on—especially by his rivals. Nevertheless, it became widely accepted that al-Jīlānī was indeed a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. The (prophetic) lineage of al-Jīlānī and his descendants is discussed (and sometimes deliberately omitted) in several biographical dictionaries between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, and is the subject of local family histories and several individual studies and treatises from at least the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, al-Jīlānī’s descent is also elaborated in the hagiographical literature. Apart from the two main hagiographical texts about the "Pole of the Poles" by ʿAlī b. Yūsuf al-Shaṭṭanawfī (d. 713/1314) and Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-Tādhifī (d. 962/1555), there were several prestigious authors who wrote about and defended the prophetic lineage of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī over the centuries: al-Fayrūzabādī (d. 817/1415) comments on it, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 852/1449) discusses it, and Jaʿfar al-Barzanjī (d. 1177/1764), famous poet of praise poetry about the Prophet Muḥammad, includes a section on al-Jīlānī’s lineage in his hagiography of the saint. While the individual studies and treatises about al-Jīlānī and his descendants written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries seem to aim at verifying and confirming (or contesting) ʿAbd al-Qādir’s lineage (and, perhaps more importantly, the elevated status of his descendants), this paper intends to examine the way genealogical information about al-Jīlānī and/or his descendants is presented in hagiographical texts. What information is included, omitted, or added, and how is it framed? What images are invoked when talking about al-Jīlānī’s prophetic descent? What is the function of the sections devoted to genealogy in the hagiographical texts? And, finally, can we observe a change over time, a tendency to verify, as we find it in other texts about al-Jīlānī and his descendants in later centuries? In this paper, I attempt to trace how hagiographical literature produces, disseminates, and popularizes genealogical knowledge and how it interacts with the knowledge presented in more sober biographical dictionaries, historical works, and scholarly treatises that purport only to document and/or verify genealogical information. I argue that we can understand the genealogical knowledge articulated in hagiographical texts as a form of popularization of scholarly knowledge, as Peter Burke suggests in his influential work on the process of knowledge production, “What is the History of Knowledge?”