Rejected in Orthodox Islam

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.