In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Verily  God  it is Who  gives  all sustenance,  Lord  of Power and Steadfast.(51:58) * How many are the creatures that carry not their own sustenance? It is God who provides for them and for you; He is All-Hearing, All-Knowing.(29:60)

O people of belief! You will have understood by now how harmful is enmity. Understand too that greed is another awesome disease, as harmful for the life of Islam as enmity. Greed brings about disappointment,  deficiency, and humiliation; it is the cause of deprivation and abjection. The humiliation and abjection of people who have leaped greedily upon the world, is a decisive proof of this truth. Greed demonstrates its evil effects throughout the animate world, from the most universal of species to the most particular of individuals. To seek out one’s sustenance while placing one’s trust in God will, by constrast, bring about tranquillity and demonstrate everywhere its beneficient effects.

Thus, fruit trees and plants, which are a species of animate being insofar as they require sustenance, remain contentedly rooted where they are, placing their trust in God and not evincing any greed; it is for this reason that their sustenance  hastens toward them. They breed too far more offspring than do the animals. The animals, by contrast, pursue their sustenance greedily, and for this reason are able to attain it only imperfectly and at the cost of great effort. Within the animal kingdom it is only the young who, as it were, evince their trust in God by proclaiming their weakness and impotence; hence it is that they receive in full measure their rightful and delicate sustenance from the treasury of divine mercy. But savage beasts that pounce greedily on  their  sustenance  can  hope  only  for  an  illicit  and  coarse  sustenance,  attained through the expenditure of great effort. These two examples show that greed is the cause  of deprivation,  while trust in God  and contentment  are the means  to God’s mercy.

In the human kingdom, some peoples have clung to the world more greedily and have loved its life with more passion than any others, but the usurious wealth they have gained with great efforts is merely illicit property over which they exercise temporary stewardship, and it benefits them little. It earns them, on the contrary, the blows of abjection and humiliation, of death and insult, that are rained down on them by all peoples.