In Kashf al-Mahjub, Hujwiri distinguishes two central technical terms of the Sufis. A maqam (station) is the place a servant occupies on the path to God: it is earned through the servant's own disciplined effort and the rendering of its full due, and one may not pass beyond a station until that due is completely fulfilled. The stations follow a fixed order — repentance (tawba), then turning to God (inabat), then asceticism (zuhd), then trust in God (tawakkul), and so on — so that a later station cannot be rightly claimed without first realizing the earlier ones. A hal (state), by contrast, descends upon the heart as a divine gift; it is not acquired by striving and is not subject to the seeker's own control. Grasping this distinction is a prerequisite for the Sufis' debates over how to classify particular experiences, such as whether contentment (rida) is a station or a state.