A frequently cited hadith states that if people relied on God with true reliance, "He would provide for you as He provides for the birds: they go out hungry in the morning and return full in the evening" (Tirmidhi), and the image is regularly invoked as the classical proof text for trust in providence, but examined closely it argues against the very passivity it is sometimes taken to endorse.
The bird in the hadith does not simply wait in the nest for provision to arrive; it goes out, searches, and exerts itself, and returns full precisely because it has done so, a detail commentators have long pointed to as evidence that the hadith illustrates the relationship between effort and trust rather than trust as a substitute for effort. This reading sits alongside the Qur'an's own explicit command to economic activity, "when the prayer is finished, disperse through the land and seek God's bounty" (62:10), issued immediately after the injunction to attend Friday congregational prayer, placing worship and the pursuit of livelihood in sequence rather than tension.
Classical Islamic ethical writing consequently treated idleness, and specifically the abandonment of a livelihood on the pretext of superior trust in God, as a departure from the Prophet's own example and that of his companions, most of whom continued in trade, agriculture or craft throughout their lives; Al-Ghazali, discussing tawakkul in the Ihya, criticizes those who cite reliance on God as an excuse for refusing ordinary work, holding that true tawakkul is a condition of the heart accompanying effort rather than a reason to withhold it, a conclusion the ascetic minority position rejected only for a narrow form of especially advanced practice, never as the standard the wider community was expected to meet.