Early Sufism was not organized into formal orders at all but consisted of loosely connected ascetic and devotional circles in cities such as Basra and Kufa from the eighth century CE, developing a shared vocabulary of stations, states and mystical love of God over the following centuries through figures including Junayd of Baghdad, who emphasized sober, doctrinally careful mysticism, and al-Hallaj, executed in 922 partly over ecstatic statements later Sufis read more sympathetically. The transition to formal orders, each with an eponymous founder, a defined initiatory chain and often a physical lodge, took place chiefly between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, a development J. Spencer Trimingham's history treats as Sufism's decisive institutional turn. Orders founded in this period and shortly after, including the Qadiriyya, Naqshbandiyya, Chishtiyya, Shadhiliyya and Mevlevi, spread along trade and pilgrimage routes across the Islamic world, becoming central to the Islamization of large parts of Central and South Asia and West Africa, and to popular devotional life more broadly.
Sufism's modern history includes both suppression, as in Turkey's 1925 ban on Sufi lodges, and continued vitality, with major orders still active worldwide and Sufi poets such as Rumi enjoying an additional, largely separate afterlife in modern Western popular spirituality that scholars including Nile Green treat as its own distinct phenomenon, related to but not equivalent to living Sufi practice within Islam.