One of the first authoritative works on the legitimate descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad in Morocco was written on behalf of the Merinids in the 15th century. Later, under the Saʿdians, registers of approved descendants of the Prophet were introduced; in the 17th century, the ʿAlawī sultan Mawlay Ismāʿīl launched a large-scale campaign to identify the Prophet’s true descendants (shurafāʾ, ashrāf). In this context, Ibn Raḥmūn, in his capacity as the Head of the Prophet’s Descendants (naqīb al-ashrāf), was tasked with compiling a countrywide list of approved shurafāʾ. Also, many other texts dealing with the descent of individual groups of shurafāʾ were written at this time, only some of which have been systematically researched so far. Under the reign of Sultan Sulaymān (r. 1792-1822), the verification of the legitimate descendants of the Prophet in Morocco experienced a new flourishing, after a supposed period of negligence under his predecessor Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh (r. 1757-1790). Sulaymān b. Muḥammad al-Ḥawwāt (d. 1816) lived through the reign of both sultans and was, as a sharīf himself, eventually appointed the Chief Naqīb al-Ashrāf in Fez. In his al-Sirr al-ẓāhir fī-man aḥraza bi-Fās al-sharaf al-bāhir min aʿqāb al-Shaykh ʿAbd-al-Qādir, he deals with the descendants of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 1166) in Fez, the renowned Iraqi scholar to whom the Sufi brotherhood al-Qādiriyya traces its origins and whose assumed prophetic lineage was the subject of controversy from the 12th well into the 19th century. This paper addresses the following questions: What was al-Ḥawwāt’s motivation for writing his al-Sirr al-ẓāhir, and how does this text differ from texts written between the 15th and 17th centuries? Is this text solely the result of his activity as Naqīb al-Ashrāf? If not, into which contemporary discourses must the text be placed beyond that? These questions are answered with the help of an in-depth analysis of the argumentative and narrative strategies employed in al-Sirr al-ẓāhir – in comparison to some of the numerous earlier and later texts on al-Jīlānī’s descendants from the Maghreb. In addition, the paper draws on al-Ḥawwāt’s autobiography and his numerous treatises on other groups of the Prophet’s descendants. With this, I would like to present a case study that examines the extent to which the conspicuous tendency toward verification was instigated solely by rulers or whether the writing of such texts must be placed within a broader scholarly and/or Sufi discourse surrounding practices of verification (taḥqīq).