A painting by Hafsa Imran

TawakkulSparrows on a Branch

Three sparrows on a bare branch, and nothing in the painting to feed them but trust.

Tawakkul (Sparrows on a Branch) is a painting by Lahore artist Hafsa Imran. Three sparrows with chestnut caps rest on a bare, leafless branch against a hazy sepia sky. Its title is the Arabic word for trusting God completely.

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Last updated: 22 October 2026

Tawakkul (Sparrows on a Branch), a painting by Hafsa Imran: three sparrows with chestnut caps rest at different heights on a bare, leafless branch against a hazy sepia and grey sky — Hafsa Imran, *Tawakkul (Sparrows on a Branch)*. Photograph of the original painting.

Look closely

What is in the painting

A bare branch crosses the canvas from the lower right, dark brown and heavy, and thins into twigs towards the left. There is not a single leaf on it.

Three sparrows sit along it at different heights, each with a chestnut cap and a dark spot on a pale cheek. The highest is the palest, almost misted into the sky, and faces right. The middle one, the most sharply painted, with white bars across its wings, faces left. The lowest bows its head and looks down.

Behind them the sky is not blue at all. It is a soft wash of sepia, warm ochre and grey, darkening towards the edges.

Artist: Hafsa Imran (Lahore, Pakistan)
Title: Tawakkul (Sparrows on a Branch)
Form: Painting, portrait format
Image: Photograph of the original painting.

Detail of Hafsa Imran's Tawakkul: the middle sparrow, chestnut cap, black cheek spot and white bars across its brown wings, facing left on the branch — Detail. The middle sparrow, the most sharply painted, white bars across its wings, facing left.

Detail of Hafsa Imran's Tawakkul: the highest sparrow, painted pale and soft on a thin twig, facing right — Detail. The highest sparrow, painted so softly it seems to fade into the sky.

Detail of Hafsa Imran's Tawakkul: the lowest sparrow on the branch, head bowed, looking down — Detail. The lowest sparrow, head bowed, looking down.

Tawakkul (Sparrows on a Branch) by Hafsa Imran as a stretched canvas on a wide plain cream wall — Tawakkul on a plain wall. The painted face is the photograph of the painting; the canvas edge and the wall are a digital presentation.

The story

Reading Tawakkul

What the title means

Tawakkul is the Arabic word Muslims use for trusting God completely: doing all you can, and then leaving the outcome to Him.

Its clearest picture in the Islamic tradition is a bird. A hadith recorded in Sunan at-Tirmidhi, narrated by Umar ibn al-Khattab, says that if people relied on God as they truly should, He would provide for them as He provides for the birds, which go out hungry in the morning and come back full in the evening.

A branch with nothing on it

Hafsa's branch is bare. No leaves, no fruit, no seed: nothing in the painting to feed three small birds. And yet none of them is searching. Each sits in its own way, one turned to the right, one to the left, one looking down at the ground below.

The birds of the hadith do not wait to be fed. They go out. That is tawakkul: not stillness, but setting out each morning without knowing what the day will bring, and going anyway.

The bird of every courtyard

In Pakistan the sparrow, chiriya in Urdu, is one of the most familiar birds there is: the one that nests in the walls of houses and hops across the courtyard. It is also disappearing from the cities. A WWF-Pakistan adviser has estimated that Karachi lost 60 to 70 percent of its sparrows in two decades, and in 2024 Sindh's wildlife department carried out the city's first count of them.

Seen that way, Hafsa's three sparrows are both a prayer and a memory: small, ordinary, and kept safe on a branch that holds them.

The description and reading on this page are written by the Bloom & Beyond studio. They are our reading of the painting, not a statement by the artist.