September 05, 2026

Let Yourself Be Moved

The furthest degree of trust in God is that you should be in His hands like a corpse in the hands of the washer, who turns it about as he wishes, while it has no motion or resistance of its own.

Al-Ghazali offers this image in the Ihya Ulum al-Din, written after he walked away from a celebrated professorship in Baghdad around 1095, overwhelmed by a crisis that no amount of scholarship could resolve. He spent the following years in retreat, living simply and studying the practices of the Sufis, searching for a certainty that outlasted argument. In his book on tawakkul, trust in God, he describes rising levels of surrender and places at the summit the image of a corpse being washed before burial, moved entirely by another's hands. It is a stark picture, but the point is practical: real trust means loosening your grip on the outcome, not just your effort toward it.