بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِBismi llāhi l-Raḥmāni l-Raḥīm.
“In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy!”
Sūrat al-Fātiḥah (سُورَةُ الْفَاتِحَةِ, “The Opening”), 1:1, translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem.
هُوَ ٱلَّذِى جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلْأَرْضَ ذَلُولًا فَٱمْشُوا۟ فِى مَنَاكِبِهَا وَكُلُوا۟ مِن رِّزْقِهِۦ ۖ وَإِلَيْهِ ٱلنُّشُورُHuwa alladhī jaʿala lakumu l-arḍa dhalūlan fa-mshū fī manākibihā wa-kulū min rizqihi wa-ilayhi l-nushūr.
“It is He who has made the earth manageable for you—travel its regions; eat His provision—and to Him you will be resurrected.”
Sūrat al-Mulk (سُورَةُ الْمُلْكِ, “Dominion”), 67:15, translated by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem.
Allah calls it His provision, but He tells us to walk through the earth. The walking does not make us independent of the Provider. It is one of the ways in which we receive what He provides.
Between “walk” and “eat His provision” lies an entire education in tawakkul (تَوَكُّل, trusting reliance upon Allah). The heart relies upon Allah; the body accepts responsibility. The servant knows that effort cannot compel a result, yet also knows that trust is not an excuse to bury the abilities Allah has given.
The following teaching story is a literary retelling woven from several older and later sources. The names have been removed so that we may first meet its question within ourselves.
The Jackal, the Lion, and the Seeker:
A seeker once approached his teacher with a question that had troubled him for years.
“Master,” he said, “teach me the secret of rizq (رِزْق, provision). I know that the provision of every creature is known to Allah, yet I do not understand how reliance upon Him and human effort belong together.”
The teacher looked at him for a long moment.
“Travel a day’s journey beyond the town,” he said, “until you reach the rocky valley at the end of the old road. Remain there, observe carefully, and do not return until something has taught you about provision.”
The seeker obeyed.
After travelling the appointed distance, he entered a lonely valley where thorn trees grew far apart and the earth was dry and stony. Beneath one of the trees he noticed a jackal.
When he came closer, he saw that the animal had lost two of its legs. The wounds had healed long ago, leaving only scarred stumps. The jackal could drag itself a little way, but it could neither chase prey nor travel far in search of food.
The seeker wondered, “How has this creature remained alive? It cannot hunt. It cannot reach another valley. Who brings its provision here?”
He concealed himself nearby and waited.
Toward evening, a roar shook the valley. The seeker’s heart pounded. He climbed the nearest tree and hid among its branches.
A lion emerged from the bushes, dragging the body of an animal it had killed. It settled beneath the tree, tore into the flesh, and ate until it was satisfied. Then it rose and disappeared into the darkness, leaving part of the carcass behind.
The disabled jackal dragged itself slowly toward the remains and ate.
The seeker watched in astonishment.
“The One who sends a lion to feed a helpless jackal can surely feed me,” he thought. “Why should I exhaust myself pursuing what has already been written? My rizq will reach me wherever I am.”
He descended from the tree, found a shaded place, and sat down to wait.
One day passed, but no food came.
A second day passed. His hunger sharpened, but he told himself, “This is a test of my trust.”
By the third day his mouth was dry and his limbs trembled. Still he remained where he was.
Several more days passed. He became so weak that he could barely raise his head. At last, fearing that he would die of thirst, he dragged himself toward the sound of running water.
He found a stream and drank deeply. The cold water revived him, but it could not satisfy his hunger.
As he sat beside the stream, he saw something floating toward him: a small basket woven from broad leaves and tied with fibres. He reached into the water and pulled it ashore.
Inside was a sweet, fragrant paste of almonds, honey, cream, sugar, and the perfume of roses. It appeared to be a rare kind of halwa.
Tears filled his eyes.
“My Lord has not forgotten me,” he whispered.
He ate and felt strength returning to his body.
The following day another leaf-basket floated downstream. The same delicious paste lay inside. Another arrived on the day after that, and then another. For several days he ate from these packages and gradually recovered.
Certain that he had witnessed a miracle of provision, he became curious about its source.
“Perhaps one of Allah’s hidden servants lives upstream and prepares this food for me,” he thought. “I must discover where it comes from.”
He began walking against the current. For several days he followed the stream through valleys, gardens, and cultivated fields. Each day a package floated past him, and each day he ate from it.
Eventually he reached a magnificent palace surrounded by walls and gardens. The stream passed beneath one wall and emerged from the palace grounds.
The seeker hid among the trees and watched.
Early the following morning, servants gathered around a marble bathing terrace. A princess entered and was bathed in milk and perfumed water. Her attendants then covered her skin with a thick preparation of crushed almonds, cream, honey, sugar, and scented oils.
When the treatment was complete, they scraped the used paste from her body. No longer the pure and fragrant mixture with which they had begun, it was now mingled with the water, oils, and impurities washed from her skin. The attendants gathered the residue, wrapped it in leaves, and threw it into the stream.
The seeker watched the familiar package float away.
His stomach turned.
This was the “heavenly halwa” he had been eating.
He remembered the healthy limbs with which Allah had created him, the intelligence with which He had honoured him, and the opportunities he had abandoned while waiting to be fed. Ashamed of the passivity he had chosen, he returned to his teacher and related everything that had happened: the disabled jackal, the lion, his decision to wait, his near starvation, the floating food, and the discovery at the palace.
The teacher listened without interrupting.
When the seeker had finished, the teacher said, “You asked Allah to teach you the secret of rizq, and He placed two creatures before you. One was genuinely helpless. The other possessed strength. One could only receive; the other went out, struggled, obtained provision, and became the means by which another creature was fed.
“Why did you choose to see yourself in the jackal?”
The seeker lowered his head.
“Do not misunderstand me,” the teacher continued. “There is no shame in receiving help when one truly needs it. The jackal had lost its legs. It did not choose its incapacity, and it used what little strength remained to crawl toward the food. It was not beneath you because it received.
“But you had not lost your legs. You had hands, intelligence, memory, speech, and the ability to plan. You discarded gifts the jackal had never possessed and called that abandonment tawakkul. The jackal did what it could. You chose to do less than you could.”
The seeker began to weep.
“And you also misunderstood the lion,” said the teacher. “The lion hunted by instinct. Perhaps it did not even intend to feed the jackal; it merely left what it no longer wanted. You are capable of something higher.
“A human being can work with intention, seek what is lawful, feed another before eating, and give from what is loved rather than from unwanted remains. A human being can protect the dignity of the one who receives. A human being can plant an orchard whose fruit will feed people not yet born; teach a skill that allows a family to support itself; establish a school, a clinic, or a waqf; organize a community so that the weak are not forgotten; and turn one act of provision into a continuing mercy.
“If a lion, acting without moral knowledge, can become the means by which one disabled creature eats, what should be expected from a human being who recognizes hunger, understands responsibility, and knows that Allah sees?”
The seeker remained silent.
“You were not created merely to imitate the lion,” the teacher said. “You were called to become better than it—not stronger in violence, but greater in conscious mercy. Do not make yourself worse than the jackal by refusing the capacities Allah entrusted to you. The jackal was patient in an incapacity it did not choose. You manufactured incapacity while still possessing the means to serve.
“You wanted the provision of the jackal without accepting the responsibility that came with your human gifts. The shame was not that you received; every person must sometimes receive. It was that, while able to seek and serve, you chose dependence and then mistook another person’s discarded residue for a special honour.”
Then the teacher’s voice softened.
“Allah alone is the Provider. Your work does not compete with Him. Your hands, strength, employer, customer, field, shop, knowledge, and opportunities are themselves part of His provision. Work while knowing that the result is His. Receive without shame when you genuinely need help. Give without humiliating anyone when He places something in your hands.
“The highest understanding of rizq is not merely to ask, ‘Will Allah feed me?’ It is also to ask, ‘Whom might Allah intend to feed through me?’”
The seeker returned to the world of work. But he no longer worked only to accumulate for himself. He understood that ability was an amānah (أَمَانَة, a trust), livelihood carried responsibility, and every blessing placed in his hands contained the possibility of becoming another person’s provision.
He had gone into the wilderness asking how rizq would reach him.
He returned asking how he might become part of Allah’s answer to someone else’s prayer.
The Bird Does Not Wait in Its Nest
Law annakum kuntum tatawakkalūna ʿalā Allāhi ḥaqqa tawakkulihi la-ruziqtum kamā turzaqu l-ṭayru, taghdū khimāṣan wa-tarūḥu biṭānan.
“If you truly relied upon Allah, He would provide for you as He provides for birds: they leave hungry and return full.”
ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī 2344; working translation.
The bird leaves.
It does not know which branch will hold its food. It possesses no contract guaranteeing that worms will appear, no warehouse of grain, and no map of tomorrow’s provision. Yet at dawn it opens its wings.
Its movement is not the opposite of reliance. Its movement is the form its reliance takes.
Tawakkul is not confidence that my plan must succeed. It is confidence in Allah while I fulfil the responsibilities He has placed before me. The limbs work; the heart does not worship the work. The servant takes the means without mistaking the means for the Provider.
Better Than the Lion
To say that the human being should become “better than the lion” is not a boast about belonging to the human species. It is a moral calling. Our greater capacities become evidence for us only when we use them well; otherwise, they become evidence against us.
The lion in the story leaves scraps. A human being can offer what is good.
The lion responds through instinct. A human being can act through intention.
The lion feeds one animal on one evening. A human being can grow food, teach a livelihood, establish a continuing charity, repair an unjust system, or organize a community so that thousands are fed.
The lion cannot ask whether the recipient’s dignity has been protected. A human being must.
The lion cannot turn provision into education, opportunity, independence, or a chain of generosity in which today’s recipient becomes tomorrow’s giver. A human being can.
Our task is therefore not to imitate the lion’s force, dominance, or violence. It is to surpass its accidental service through conscious compassion.
What This Story Does Not Mean: Not Worse Than the Jackal
The disabled jackal should not become a symbol of shame. Illness, disability, age, unemployment, disaster, oppression, and sudden need are not moral failures. Every human community needs people who know how to receive assistance without losing dignity, just as it needs people who know how to give without pride.
Nor does hard work guarantee wealth. People may labour faithfully and remain poor because of illness, exclusion, exploitation, war, caregiving duties, or circumstances beyond their control. The rebuke in this story is not directed at the poor; it is directed at the capable person who romanticizes a passivity he has freely chosen.
The jackal’s condition was real. The seeker’s chosen helplessness was not.
The warning is for the person who possesses the ability to act but uses religious language to escape responsibility. It is for the nafs (نَفْس, the lower self) that renames laziness “contentment,” poor preparation “trust,” avoidance “surrender,” and dependence upon people “dependence upon Allah.”
The person who genuinely cannot carry a burden deserves support. The person who can carry it but quietly places it on someone weaker needs awakening.
When Spirituality Becomes an Excuse
This story is not only about earning money. We become the waiting seeker whenever we ask Allah to repair through miracle what He has already given us the means and responsibility to address.
- We pray for knowledgeable children but do not make time to teach, read, listen, or model a life of learning.
- We ask for barakah in our work while neglecting planning, honesty, punctuality, and care.
- We pray for the poor but do not examine our consumption, wages, generosity, or the systems we help maintain.
- We ask Allah to heal relationships while refusing to apologize, listen, forgive, or change a harmful habit.
- We complain that no one serves the community while protecting our own time, comfort, knowledge, and resources from every demand.
- We ask for capable colleagues or leaders while leaving work for others that we ourselves could carry.
Duʿāʾ is not a substitute for responsibility. Action is not a substitute for duʿāʾ. The believer brings both together: need before Allah, movement within the world, and humility about the result.
Which Creature Have I Chosen?
- Where am I waiting for help while neglecting an ability Allah has already given me?
- Which responsibility have I renamed “trust in Allah” because I do not want its discomfort?
- Do the people who depend upon me receive my best, or only what remains after I have satisfied myself?
- When I help someone, do I protect that person’s dignity?
- Am I creating repeated dependence, or helping another person recover agency where that is possible?
- What knowledge, access, position, strength, money, or time has reached me that may actually be someone else’s rizq passing through my hands?
- If an animal acting by instinct can become a means of provision, what should conscious faith produce in me?
May Allah grant us hearts that rely upon Him without using reliance to escape responsibility.
May He protect those who genuinely need assistance from shame, neglect, and the cruelty of those who give with pride.
May He make our work lawful, our provision pure, our giving beautiful, and our abilities a source of ease for His creation.
May He teach us to leave the nest with the bird, to care for the injured without despising them, and to rise beyond the lion through intention, mercy, justice, and service.
And when someone asks Allah for help, may He sometimes honour us by allowing part of His answer to pass through our hands.
Āmīn (آمِينَ, O Allah, answer this prayer).
Source Note: A Story Woven from Several Traditions
The narrative above is a composite teaching story. It is not found as one continuous account in a classical Arabic or Persian source, and it should not be attributed in its entirety to either Ibrāhīm ibn Adham or Shaqīq al-Balkhī. Its parts can be traced to several distinct narratives.
The parallels below explain how the present reconstruction was made; they do not by themselves prove a direct line of borrowing from one text to the next.
1. Shaqīq al-Balkhī, Ibrāhīm ibn Adham, and the Two Birds
The earliest source located for the central correction is Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn Marwān al-Dīnawarī’s al-Majālasa wa-jawāhir al-ʿilm, report no. 3350. Al-Dīnawarī died in 333/944.
In that account, Ibrāhīm ibn Adham meets Shaqīq al-Balkhī in Mecca and asks how his spiritual course began. Shaqīq says that while crossing a wilderness he saw a bird with both wings broken. A healthy bird arrived carrying a locust and placed it in the injured bird’s beak. Shaqīq concluded that the God who provided for the injured bird could provide for him wherever he was, so he abandoned earning and occupied himself with worship.
Ibrāhīm corrects him: why did he not choose to be the healthy bird that fed the afflicted one? He then invokes the Prophetic teaching:
Al-yadu l-ʿulyā khayrun mina l-yadi l-suflā.
“The upper hand is better than the lower hand.”
See Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 1427–1428.
Shaqīq kisses Ibrāhīm’s hand and calls him his teacher. This account supplies the seeker, the mistaken abandonment of earning, and the instruction to become the creature that provides. It contains birds—not a lion, fox, or jackal—and contains no starvation, stream, halwa, palace, or princess.
Arabic text: al-Dīnawarī, al-Majālasa wa-jawāhir al-ʿilm, no. 3350, vol. 8, pp. 42–43.
2. Hujwīrī’s Lion and Lame Fox
An earlier Persian lion-and-fox account appears in ʿAlī al-Hujwīrī’s eleventh-century Kashf al-maḥjūb. It concerns Aḥmad Ḥammādī of Sarakhs, not Ibrāhīm or Shaqīq.
A lion kills one of Aḥmad’s camels. It tears the carcass apart and withdraws while foxes, wolves, jackals, and other animals eat. When a lame fox approaches, the lion waits until it too has eaten before taking something for itself. The lesson concerns īthār (إِيثَار, preferring others to oneself), not a man mistakenly imitating the fox.
English translation: al-Hujwīrī, The Kashf al-Maḥjūb, translated by R. A. Nicholson, pp. 193–194.
3. Saʿdī’s Disabled Fox and the Command to Become the Lion
The fullest classical source for the lion, disabled animal, mistaken passivity, near starvation, and forceful correction is Saʿdī’s Būstān, completed in 655/1257, chapter II on beneficence.
An unnamed dervish sees a fox without functioning hands or feet. A lion arrives carrying a jackal, eats it, and leaves enough for the fox. When this happens again, the dervish decides to wait for his own provision. He wastes away until little remains but veins, bones, and skin. A voice from the wall of the prayer-place rebukes him: be the ravening lion, not the crippled fox. Saʿdī tells him to obtain through his own effort, share with others, endure toil, and become the servant through whose existence people find ease.
This source explains a common animal confusion: the disabled creature is a fox; the jackal is the lion’s prey. Later retellings have transferred the jackal’s identity to the disabled animal.
Persian text: Saʿdī, Būstān, chapter II, story 17.
4. The Floating Halwa and the Princess’s Used Cosmetics
The river, leaf-wrapped food, palace, and princess belong to a separate story commonly called “The Food of Paradise.” The earliest printed form located during this research appears in Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah’s The Coronation Book of Oriental Literature (London, 1937), issued in the United States as The Book of Oriental Literature (Garden City, 1938). The tale is credited to “Ibn Amjed,” sometimes misread by optical character recognition as “Ibn Ahmed.”
Its protagonist is a fictional, poorly paid Baghdad seminary teacher called Mullah Ibrāhīm. Concluding that genuine faith means waiting for Allah to feed him directly, he leaves his work and sits beside a river. After approximately two days without food, a leaf-wrapped package floats toward him. Inside is what he believes to be Baghdad halwa made from sugar, almond paste, rose perfume, and other essences.
Similar packages arrive daily for months. He follows them upstream to the Silver Castle and, after a magical rescue involving a jinn named Adhem, asks the princess about the food. She explains that she bathes in milk, rubs her limbs with almond essence, sugar, and scented cosmetics, then removes the used mixture from her naked body, wraps it in leaves, and throws it into the river. What he had praised as heavenly halwa was discarded cosmetic and bathing residue.
The curious presence of a protagonist named Ibrāhīm and a jinn named Adhem may help explain how oral retelling eventually attached the halwa episode to Ibrāhīm ibn Adham. This is a plausible inference, not a claim made by the source.
Bibliographical record and scanned text: Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, ed., The Book of Oriental Literature (Garden City Publishing, 1938), “The Food of Paradise,” beginning on p. 30; 1937 British edition scan.
Idries Shah later reworked the tale in Tales of the Dervishes (1967), pp. 15–20. His protagonist is Yūnus son of Adam; the supposed halwa contains almond paste, rosewater, honey, and nuts; and the princess identifies it as cosmetic residue left after her bath in asses’ milk. Shah’s moral concerns the limits of human understanding: her discarded toilet preparation became his “Food of Paradise.” Shah attributes the story to “Halqavi,” but no independently identifiable earlier manuscript or secure pre-1937 version was located in this research.
Book information: Idries Shah, Tales of the Dervishes, “The Food of Paradise.”
5. Who Were Ibrāhīm ibn Adham and Shaqīq al-Balkhī?
Ibrāhīm ibn Adham was the older eighth-century ascetic associated with Balkh and later Syria; reports place his death between approximately 161 and 166 AH/778–83 CE. Shaqīq ibn Ibrāhīm al-Balkhī was his younger contemporary and is commonly dated to 194/810.
They were not father and son. Shaqīq’s own father was simply another man named Ibrāhīm. Early biographical sources identify Shaqīq as someone who transmitted from and kept company with Ibrāhīm ibn Adham. Early Sufi hagiography, particularly al-Sulamī, further remembers Shaqīq as having “taken the Path” from him. It is therefore reasonable to describe Shaqīq as Ibrāhīm’s younger companion, transmitter, and spiritual pupil, provided this is not mistaken for membership in a later formal Sufi order.
Biographical references: al-Sulamī, Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya, biography of Shaqīq al-Balkhī; “Ebrāhīm b. Adham,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.
6. What Has Been Added in This Retelling?
The narrative at the beginning of this post intentionally joins the moral architecture of these separate stories. The teacher’s assigned journey, the single continuous sequence, the disabled jackal, and the return to the teacher after the palace episode are literary bridges. They are not details found together in one source.
The teaching that the human being should become better than the lion develops the older moral rather than quoting it. Saʿdī commands the hearer to become the lion who obtains and shares. The present retelling takes one further step: because a human being possesses moral intention, foresight, language, organization, and responsibility, the goal is not merely to copy the lion but to surpass instinctive or accidental provision through conscious mercy.
The language of the human being as khalīfah (خَلِيفَة, entrusted successor or steward) is likewise an interpretive frame, not wording found in the bird story, Saʿdī’s poem, or “The Food of Paradise.” The more immediate classical formulations are the “upper hand,” the healthy bird that feeds the injured one, and Saʿdī’s servant through whose existence other people find ease.
A teaching story may grow as it travels. But when it grows, honesty requires us to distinguish the inherited seeds from the branches we ourselves have added.
