The Four Stages of Sufism: A Historical-Philosophical Reading of the Transformations of Spiritual Conduct

أطوار التَّصوُّف الأربعة: قراءة تاريخية فلسفية لتحوّلات السلوك الرُّوحي

Abstract

This study offers a historical and philosophical analysis of four major stages in Islamic Sufism understood as spiritual conduct within Islam. It traces the movement from early ascetic piety in the first two Islamic centuries, through classical Sufism centered on divine love, to the Khurasan path of attraction and annihilation, and finally to the metaphysical synthesis associated with Ibn Arabi and later thinkers. The research asks how forms of spiritual practice, language, and self-understanding shifted across these stages, and how changing political and intellectual settings shaped those shifts without erasing a shared ethical core. The study relies on close reading of early zuhd literature, classical Sufi manuals, hagiographical collections, and key philosophical Sufi works, along with modern critical scholarship in Arabic and European languages. The analysis shows that the first stage framed Sufism as intense God-conscious adherence to Qur’an and Sunna; the second recast the same rigor around love, longing, and technical notions such as state, station, and ecstasy. The third stage pushed experience toward sustained attraction and annihilation, yet kept debate over law and normativity in view. The fourth articulated wide-ranging ontological schemes, most famously the doctrine associated with wahdat al wujud, and triggered enduring controversy among theologians and jurists. I argue that these four stages form a single long-developing project of inner purification, rather than competing departures from Islamic normativity, and that this long arc helps explain both the endurance of Sufism and its ongoing power to speak to diverse seekers of God.