Not renunciation — orientation.
Narrated by Ibn ʿUmar (ابن عمر)
كُنْ فِي الدُّنْيَا كَأَنَّكَ غَرِيبٌ أَوْ عَابِرُ سَبِيلٍ
"Be in this world as though you were a stranger, or a traveller passing through."
The 40th hadith of al-Nawawi's collection. Ibn ʿUmar, narrating it, would add: "When you reach evening, do not expect to see the morning. When you reach morning, do not expect to see the evening. Take from your health before your sickness, and from your life before your death." The hadith is not telling the Muslim to renounce the world — it is telling him not to mistake this stop for the destination.
Passages that draw on this hadith
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"making him a stranger among the people of the hereafter, let alone among the people of the world, just as the seeker of the hereafter is a stranger among the people of the world. The statement, "for the knower is a stranger in his witness," refers to the certainty the knower has"
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"Be a child of the Hereafter and do not be a child of this world, for the child follows its mother. This world is not worth the moving of your feet toward it — so how can you run behind it? This world is a carcass, and the lion does not stoop to carrion. This world is a passageway and the Hereafter is home, and one's desires are sought only in one's homeland."
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"A benefit: Desire for the hereafter is not complete except through detachment from this world, and detachment from this world is not sound except after two correct reflections. The first is a reflection upon this world: how swiftly it passes, perishes, and dissolves; its deficiency and lowliness; the pain of jostling for it and craving it; the bitter draughts, vexations, and miseries it brings; and at the end of it all, departure and severance,"
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"Meanwhile, the one deprived and in need diverts their heart from the world, viewing it as a prison they wish to escape. Therefore, if two people leave this world, and one is more attached to it, their condition is more severe because their heart is inclined towards the world and wary of the hereafter proportionately to their attachment to this world."
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"The breadth of the world that the servant encounters in death to the world’s expanse is like the world’s size to the womb, but even wider and grander. So compare the Hereafter to the present world. Your creation and resurrection are nothing but like that of a single soul, and the second creation is akin to the first."
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"The pleasure derived from moving the limbs during bowing and prostration occurs only in this world, which is why he attributed it to this world. However, in this book, we only address the blameworthy aspects of the world, so we say this is not part of the blameworthy world."
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"Sincerity and Tawhid are a tree in the heart: its branches are deeds, and its fruit is a goodly life in this world and abiding bliss in the Hereafter. And just as the fruits of Paradise are neither cut off nor withheld, so too is the fruit of Tawhid and sincerity in this world. Idolatry, falsehood, and ostentation are a tree in the heart whose fruit in this world is fear, anxiety, grief, constriction of the breast, and darkness of the heart,"
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"Some err in their path, some are close to error, and some succeed, though they are the fewest among people in the least of their affairs, and God knows best. Thus, the expulsion of worry is a path upon which all nations have agreed since God created the world until the world of beginnings ends and is succeeded by the world of reckoning, that they rely on nothing else in their endeavors."