Tawakkul (Trust in God)

A widely cited hadith, transmitted through al Tirmidhi among other collectors, has a Bedouin ask the Prophet whether he should tie his camel and then place his trust in God, or leave it untied and trust in God, and receive the answer to tie it first, and then trust in God, a teaching akhlaq literature treats as the definitive rebuttal against reading tawakkul as fatalism or as an excuse for inaction.

Ghazali situates the virtue within a wider metaphysical picture of secondary causation, arguing that God has established a world of ordinary means, medicine for illness, effort for livelihood, precaution for safety, and that using those means is itself part of trusting God rather than a lapse from it, since God is the one who instituted the means in the first place; true tawakkul, on this reading, is the inner confidence that the outcome ultimately rests with God regardless of how carefully the means were used, not a refusal to use them. The Quran commands believers repeatedly to put their trust in God after having taken counsel and made a decision, a sequence, consultation, decision, then trust, that later ethical literature reads as establishing a clear order of operations rather than presenting trust as a substitute for deliberation.

A hadith recorded by al Tirmidhi states that if people truly relied on God as they ought, God would provide for them as He provides for birds, which set out hungry in the morning and return with full stomachs in the evening, an image frequently invoked in devotional literature though one Ghazali is careful to qualify, since the birds themselves still fly out and forage rather than remaining in the nest, making the image an illustration of trust accompanied by effort rather than of trust replacing it, consistent with his broader reading of the virtue through secondary causation. Sufi literature develops tawakkul into a graded technical concept, distinguishing several levels of reliance, from the trust of an ordinary believer in outcomes to the more advanced states some writers describe as trust like a client before an attorney or like a corpse in the hands of one who washes it, images meant to convey progressively deeper degrees of surrendering personal agency over outcomes, though mainstream akhlaq scholarship, including Ghazali's own treatment, generally keeps the highest of these formulations reserved for advanced spiritual states rather than presenting them as the ordinary standard expected of every believer's daily conduct.