Tanasukh

Tanasukh, the Arabic term for the transmigration or reincarnation of the soul into successive bodies, is rejected as heretical by mainstream Sunni and Shia theology, which teaches bodily resurrection, qiyama, at a single last judgment rather than a cycle of rebirths. The doctrine conflicts directly with core eschatological claims: if souls are recycled into new bodies during earthly history, the promised resurrection and individual accounting on the Day of Judgment lose their force, since a soul's moral history would already have been redistributed across several unrelated lives and bodies.

Classical heresiographers catalogued belief in tanasukh among the doctrines of groups they placed outside the boundaries of orthodox Islam, including certain Ghulat, extremist Shia sects active in the early Islamic centuries, and philosophers influenced by currents outside the Quranic and hadith mainstream. The rejection is near universal across the schools of Islamic jurisprudence and theology that consider the question, making tanasukh one of the clearer doctrinal boundary markers separating normative Sunni and Twelver Shia Islam from smaller esoteric traditions that emerged from an Islamic milieu but diverged from it on this specific point.

Tanasukh is not a marginal belief within the Druze Faith but one of its defining and best known tenets, distinguishing Druze theology sharply from the Islamic mainstream from which the movement historically emerged in eleventh century Egypt. Druze doctrine holds that the soul, at the moment of bodily death, is immediately reborn into a new human body, with no interval and no possibility of rebirth into an animal, plant or any non human form, a restriction that marks Druze tanasukh as narrower than Hindu or Buddhist rebirth doctrines, which generally allow movement across the full range of sentient existence.

The number of souls in the Druze understanding is fixed and does not grow, so every rebirth is a redistribution of an unchanging population of souls rather than new souls being created. Druze theology treats this doctrine as central enough that community religious identity is bound up with it, and the faith does not proselytize or accept converts, in part because Druze identity is understood along the same lines as the soul's transmigration, as a closed and inherited population rather than an open one. Details beyond this structure belong to the tradition's esoteric teaching, elaborated among initiated members rather than in public doctrine.