This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sufi Texts gathers five works Sufi orders and scholars treat as central literature, spanning poetry, systematic doctrine and a manual of practice.
Two come from Ibn Arabi and set the terms much of later Sufi metaphysics argues over. Fusus al-Hikam sets out, in twenty seven short chapters each attached to a prophet, his account of how the divine is disclosed in creation, each prophet the setting or bezel holding one facet of wisdom; it is the most commented on and most contested book in Sufi literature, since the doctrine usually labelled the unity of being is read from it, and Ibn Arabi says he received it in a dream from the Prophet. Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, the Meccan Openings, is his far larger compendium, running to several hundred chapters on law, cosmology and letter symbolism, and the work where most of his technical vocabulary is defined, though its size has kept it far less read than the Fusus.
Rumi's Masnavi is six books and some twenty five thousand couplets of Persian verse, the central teaching text of the Mevlevi order, teaching by telling a story and breaking off to read it, a deliberately digressive method meant to train rather than inform. Attar's Conference of the Birds, an allegorical poem in which the birds cross seven valleys to find their king the Simurgh, only to discover the thirty survivors are themselves, a pun on the Persian word for thirty birds, is the best known work of a poet Rumi named as his own predecessor.
Al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din, the revival of the religious sciences, is arranged in four quarters, on worship, custom, the vices that destroy and the virtues that save, treating law and inner life as one subject; it made Sufi interiority respectable to jurists and remains among the Muslim world's most widely read books.