Most late medieval and modern scholars consider the North African Sufi Abu l-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 656/1258) to be the eponymous “founder” of the Sufi brotherhood known as the Shadhiliya. In such a model, al-Shadhili deliberately created a new social order organized around his own teachings and personality. However, very few of his contemporaries took note of al-Shadhili during his lifetime, nor do they refer to his followers in any way that might indicate corporate organization. It is actually not until the middle of the fourteenth century CE at the earliest that biographical and historical writings in Arabic refer to groups in Egypt and North Africa that we might identify as the Shadhili order (al-ta'ifa al-shadhiliya). While it is clear that al-Sh?dhil? was a charismatic teacher who had many followers and was known for his particular method (tariqa) during his lifetime, how did a posthumous tariqa-lineage and concomitant social order associated with his name come to exist in Egypt? In this paper I describe and theorize what happened between the death of Abu l-Hasan al-Shadhili and the emergence of an identifiable social entity linked to him eponymously. The integral stage in this development is what I call the institutionalization of Sufi identity. In short, such institutionalization is a process whereby a discrete set of doctrines and practices are metonymically mapped onto the personality of an individual by means of hagiography and/or silsila constructions. Importantly, it is this institutionalized identity that constitutes the necessary conditions for the production and reproduction of emergent social formations by integrating social bodies via ideal models of both praxis and doctrine. In this paper I focus on the institutionalization of Shadhili identity created by the hagiography of al-Shadhili written by Ibn 'Ata Allah al-Iskandari (d. 709/1309), Lata'if al-minan (The Subtle Blessings). In Lata'if al-minan, al-Iskandari maps out in narrative form the ideal doctrines, practices, and notion of authority that provided the nascent order with such an institutionalized identity. I argue that the telling and re-telling of the narratives, coupled with the practices associated with those narratives and the recitation of al-Shadhili's litanies and prayers performatively created a social group that could trace its genesis back to his personality. I also note the ways in which, following the work of Anthony Giddens, such institutionalized identity is often recursively constituted to account for changing social conditions and the emergence of new groups associated with al-Shadhili's name.