Zuhd and Tawakkul

Zuhd is renunciation, sometimes translated asceticism or austerity. Tawakkul is trust in God, or dependence on Him. They belong together because in the classical scheme one is the precondition of the other, and the order cannot be rearranged to taste.

Suhrawardī's definition of the first is compact and worth keeping:

“The meaning of zuhd is the expending of desire (for God) away from the world.”

— Awārif al-Maʿārif, Chapter X

Note that this is not the extinction of desire but its redirection. Zuhd spends desire elsewhere; it does not claim to abolish it. In the same passage he adds that poverty (fakr) “is the form of zuhd and its sign” — the outward shape of an inward reorientation.

The order is not optional

Both terms are stations rather than states — things earned by effort and held, not gifts that descend (see ḥāl and maqām). Al-Hujwīrī lists them in sequence and forbids skipping:

“The first ‘station’ is repentance (tawbat), then comes conversion (inábat), then renunciation (zuhd), then trust in God (tawakkul)… It is not permissible that anyone should pretend to conversion without repentance, or to renunciation without conversion, or to trust in God without renunciation.”

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

The reason is practical rather than ceremonial. Trust in God, in this literature, has a concrete meaning: doing without the ordinary securities. Someone who has not first loosened his grip on the world has nothing to trust God with.

The one station that has no calamity

Suhrawardī makes a striking claim for tawakkul. Every stage of the path, he says, has both a favourable and an unfavourable face — “a beginning and a prosperity suitable to its face; and an end and a calamity suitable to the back of the head.” Then the exception:

“…except the stage of tawakkul, which is all beginning or prosperity, and which never terminateth in end and calamity.”

— Awārif al-Maʿārif, Chapter VIII

Every other attainment can be spoiled by being possessed. Trust cannot, because there is nothing in it for the possessor to hold.

He also records what this looked like in the direction of disciples: a shaikh who judges it good for a disciple “to abandon kasb (acquisition) and to remain in beggary” puts him “on tawakkul… and on the abandoning of the means (of livelihood).” (Chapter IV)

Renunciation as a stage, not a personality

Margaret Smith, writing on Rabiʿa, is careful to distinguish the beginner's asceticism from what the term means further along:

“Renunciation, or asceticism (zuhd), is to be considered side by side with this high conception of Poverty. The first stage of zuhd, to the Sufi, is initiatory and represents the Purgative Life.”

— Rabiʿa the Mystic, Chapter IX

She also notes that poverty in the developed sense “signifies the state of complete self-loss, exceedingly hard to attain, and not leading to Union, unless it is perfect” — and that even then the mystic “may be subject to a Dark Night of the Soul before attaining to Union.” Renunciation is not a guarantee of anything; it clears ground.

Her observation that the teaching is “similar to that of the New Testament, ‘How hardly shall they that have riches enter in’” is one of the places where her comparative frame is doing useful work rather than flattening the material.

Where it leads

In Rabiʿa's chapter these stations run on into unification and dependence, and Smith quotes a saying that shows how completely renunciation is meant to reorganise attention: “when thou hast said, ‘God’, thou shouldst no more speak of the creatures nor think upon them in thine heart, so that it is as if the creatures were not.” (Chapter IX)