Taqwa comes from a root meaning to guard or shield oneself, and is rendered God-consciousness, mindfulness of God, or piety. The image beneath it is protective: an awareness of God that stands between a person and wrongdoing. It is the Qur'an's most comprehensive term for right religious disposition, and it appears at the hinge of many of its central statements.
The Qur'an opens by describing itself as "guidance for those who have taqwa" (2:2), so that the quality is both the fruit of the book and the condition for receiving it. Fasting is prescribed "so that you may attain taqwa" (2:183). Of the sacrifice it says that "neither their flesh nor their blood reaches God, but your taqwa reaches Him" (22:37), making inward disposition the thing actually offered. And in 49:13, addressed to humanity at large, after the statement that God made peoples and tribes so that they might know one another, comes the clause most often quoted in Muslim arguments against ethnic and lineage claims: "the noblest of you before God is the one with the most taqwa."
Moral and Sufi writers describe degrees: guarding oneself from unbelief, then from what is forbidden, then from the doubtful, and at the furthest reach from whatever occupies the heart in place of God. Umar ibn al-Khattab's reported definition, walking a thorn-strewn path with one's garment gathered close, is the image most often used to explain it. Because taqwa is interior and unverifiable, the tradition draws a consistent conclusion from it: that no one is in a position to rank anyone else.