Yarsani theology holds that a single Divine Essence has made itself known across history not through one revelation but through repeated cycles, called dowreh, in which the Essence and a company of seven angelic beings, the Haftan, take on human form to renew the tradition's teaching. Yarsanis hold the current cycle began with the appearance of Sultan Sahak, a figure scholarship places provisionally in the fifteenth century CE, whom the tradition reveres not as a teacher alone but as the Divine Essence itself manifest, joined by six companions who together constitute the Haftan of this cycle. Earlier cycles, tied to earlier manifestations, are held to have prepared the way for his own.
Alongside cyclical manifestation stands a distinctive teaching on the soul's fate: successive reincarnation, don ba don, across as many as one thousand and one lives, through which the soul is purified on its way toward eventual union with the Divine Essence. This teaching, together with the veneration of the Haftan, sets Yarsanism apart from the Sunni and Shia Islam surrounding it, even as its devotional vocabulary, its ranks of sayyed and pir, and much of its ethical teaching draw visibly on Sufi and Shia forms. Scholars accordingly describe Yarsanism as a genuinely distinct religion that took shape within an Islamic environment rather than a sect or school of Islam, a reading its core doctrines do not share with mainstream Islamic theology at all.
Yarsani worship expresses this doctrine directly. The jam, a devotional gathering accompanied by the tanbur, a long necked lute held sacred, brings the community together under a sayyed's guidance to sing the kalams recording the Haftan's teaching, keeping manifestation a lived practice rather than a settled article of belief alone.