(187) It is related by Abu Zarr Ghifari that the Apostle of God said: “Zuhd in relation to the world and detachment from what it has to offer, [which is wholly a spiritual state], is not the name of making for yourself unlawful what is allowed and destroying your goods, but its real requirement is that you place greater reliance upon what is with God and in His control than upon what is with you and in you control, and when you undergo a disagreeable experience or suffer a calamity, the ardour and yearning for the reward of the Hereafter is greater that the wish that it may not have happened [to you] at all.”
-Tirmidhi and Ibn-i-Maja
Commentary.-A common misconception about Zuhd is that a man should deem all the good things of life forbidden to himself: he should neither eat delicious food nor drink cold water nor wear expensive clothes nor sleep on a soft bed, and if he received some money from anywhere, he should quickly part with it. The Holy Prophet has removed the mistaken idea in the above Tradition by telling that Zuhd did not mean that one made unlawful for oneself the bodily pleasures God had declared as legitimate for his Bondmen and did away with the money that might come to his hand but that a man should not rely upon what he possessed or controlled in this world, believing that it was wholly transitory and perishable, and put his trust in the hidden and everlasting treasures of the Almighty and in His providential care, and its other test and indication was that when a suffering or distress overtook him, the longing for the reward on it in the Hereafter was stronger than the wish that he would have been left untouched by it, i.e., instead of desiring that the misfortune had not reached him, he felt in his heart that the recompense he would receive on it in the Hereafter would be thousand times better than that the affliction had stayed away. Such a state can, evidently, be attained only when the yearning for the joy of Futurity is greater than the desire for worldly comfort – and this is what Zuhd, basically, signifies.
It must, however, not be imagined that in place of comfort and well-being, people should wish and pray to God for pain and suffering in the present existence. A clear interdiction against it is contained in a number of Traditions. The Prophet always exhorted the Companions to beseech God only for comfort and well-being and the same was his own practice.
The purport of Abu Zarr's report, thus, is not, at all, that the bondman should long for grief or misfortune in the present world. What it simply shows is that when a loss or distress might befall him, he should as a truthful Believer and a genuine ascetic, attach greater importance to the reward he was going to get on it in the future world than to the feeling that it had not reached him at all. The difference between the two states needs be understood clearly.