Our religion is our trust

Occasion: A summary of a Friday sermon delivered at Bayt Al-Karim on July 24, 2026Source: transcription of a recorded khutbah by Dr. Ahmed Abouseif — watch the original video on YouTube

Hand something precious to a person and ask him to keep it, and you have already said something about him. You trust him. He may even add to what you gave him; at the very least he will return it as it was. To be asked is an honor, because it means someone found you reliable.

All praise is due to Allah. We praise Him, seek His help and His forgiveness, and ask Him to increase the faith in our hearts. I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and that Muhammad ﷺ is His final Messenger and Prophet.

The subject today is our dīn, our religion, understood as an amānah, a trust. The word deserves sessions of its own, but the picture above is enough to begin with.

The offer the heavens declined

Near the end of Sūrat al-Aḥzāb, Allah tells us how this trust was first offered:

﴿إِنَّا عَرَضْنَا الْأَمَانَةَ عَلَى السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَالْجِبَالِ فَأَبَيْنَ أَن يَحْمِلْنَهَا وَأَشْفَقْنَ مِنْهَا وَحَمَلَهَا الْإِنسَانُ ۖ إِنَّهُ كَانَ ظَلُومًا جَهُولًا﴾ [الأحزاب: 72]

"We offered the trust to the heavens, the earth and the mountains, and they declined to bear it and were afraid of it; but the human being bore it. Surely he has always been unjust and ignorant."

Their refusal is not the refusal of the proud. Nobody here is reported saying "no, I will not do it" in the voice of someone full of himself. The verse says they were afraid of it^[1], and that is the tone of a creature answering: forgive me, I am not the right one for this. It is humility. Then the human being took it up, and the verse describes him in the same breath. The description is not offered as a reason for his taking it; it simply tells us what kind of creature was handed the trust.

And the human being is a mixture. I can speak for myself. I am usually humble, and yet I find that I carry an ego too, and each of them comes out at its own moment. Some people are so covered by their ego that it has nowhere to hide. The generous and the stingy, the skilled and the talented: all of it is in the description of man.

Why this verse sits in this sūrah

To read the verse well, ask what the sūrah is about. Al-Aḥzāb takes its name from the confederate armies, and when we hear that word we think of enemies gathering against the Muslim community. How does the sūrah begin? With a command to the Prophet ﷺ himself:

﴿يَا أَيُّهَا النَّبِيُّ اتَّقِ اللَّهَ وَلَا تُطِعِ الْكَافِرِينَ وَالْمُنَافِقِينَ﴾ [الأحزاب: 1]

"O Prophet, be mindful of Allah and do not obey the disbelievers and the hypocrites."

Picture hearing "be mindful of Allah" and wondering what you did wrong. The point is not that something was lacking in the one addressed. The point is that whoever holds a position in the religion owes that position its full due, before anything else. I keep repeating this, to myself first: wake up, what is your first position in this world? You are a Muslim. The wife, the children, the career, the degree all come after that.

Then the sūrah shows what the position costs. The believers were surrounded. The disbelieving tribes had pooled all the strength they had for a single purpose, to destroy this community, and the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions dug a trench around Madīnah, a gap wide enough that anyone trying to leap it might fall. We need not go through the details. We only need to remember what kind of struggle they were in.

After that the sūrah turns to the wives of the Prophet ﷺ and speaks to them directly:

﴿يَا أَيُّهَا النَّبِيُّ قُل لِّأَزْوَاجِكَ إِن كُنتُنَّ تُرِدْنَ الْحَيَاةَ الدُّنْيَا وَزِينَتَهَا فَتَعَالَيْنَ أُمَتِّعْكُنَّ وَأُسَرِّحْكُنَّ سَرَاحًا جَمِيلًا ۝ وَإِن كُنتُنَّ تُرِدْنَ اللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُ وَالدَّارَ الْآخِرَةَ فَإِنَّ اللَّهَ أَعَدَّ لِلْمُحْسِنَاتِ مِنكُنَّ أَجْرًا عَظِيمًا﴾ [الأحزاب: 28–29]

"O Prophet, say to your wives: If you desire the life of this world and its adornment, come, I will provide for you and release you in a gracious manner. But if you desire Allah, His Messenger and the home of the Hereafter, then Allah has prepared for those of you who do good a great reward."

And further on: ﴿يَا نِسَاءَ النَّبِيِّ لَسْتُنَّ كَأَحَدٍ مِّنَ النِّسَاءِ﴾ [الأحزاب: 32], "Wives of the Prophet, you are not like any other women."

The preacher counted this among the challenges the Prophet ﷺ faced in spreading the call of Allah at that time. When I say that our religion is our trust, I mean the thing we hold in our hearts, and in our minds as well. Nothing comes before it, in what I think or in what I feel. If I lose my religion I have lost everything. A bank account with millions in it would be nothing. Ten children would be nothing. Even health would be nothing.

Those who carried it before us

We remind ourselves often of the prophets who came before Muhammad ﷺ and of what they gave to defend this religion. Yūsuf spent long years in struggle. Ibrāhīm was thrown into the fire. Mūsā lived under pressure. Muḥammad ﷺ came with all of that behind him. Every one of them paid, and the reason was the same: the dīn.

Closer to home, in our own area, a large project was planned on a big piece of land, a mosque and a Muslim community around it. Recently a post went around on Facebook with the familiar message: why are the Muslims here, go back home. The right to voice an opinion is not what troubles me. What troubles me is the temperature of feeling underneath, and what it tells us about the people we live among.

What do we take from this? That we cannot defend our religion by arguing alone. We defend it by practicing it, by showing in our own lives what mercy means in Islam. We are not here to be against anyone, least of all those who are against us; our ethics are the answer, and I agree with that completely. But we should also understand the mentality of the people around us. And we must be clear about why we are here. If we are here only to make money, we will lose everything. If we are here to keep our religion strong and to hand it to the generations after us, we win in this life and in the next.

Believing at a cost

Do we believe in Allah the right way? If a man cheats other people to get more money, is he believing in Allah the right way? If he steals from someone, does he have real faith? We cheat ourselves when we claim to be Muslims. "Praise God, I pray, I do my work," and meanwhile we go around trying to be clever with Allah. It makes no sense. He knows everything about you, He sees what you do, He counts every action. Sometimes we choose to ignore that fact so as to follow our desires, to do what we want and not what we should.

Allah asks us to believe in Him at a risk. Think of the mind of Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, who would come and put all his wealth in the hands of the Prophet ﷺ, certain that Allah would give it back. Think of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, one of the greatest donors in Islamic history, who never said no. We, unfortunately, believe in money more than we believe in Allah. I am not ashamed to say it, because I see it in my own work as an imam. People come into my office all day, spouses with a problem between them, partners with a dispute, and as they talk you understand that they trust the money more than they trust the One who created it.

Keeping the trust

The mountains were afraid of the amānah and we picked it up. Whoever seeks health, or reconciliation with a spouse, or an answer for a problem with children, will find it in the dīn. What remains is to ask, each of us, whether we are carrying it in our hearts and in our minds, before anything else in our lives.

--- ^[1]: Editor's documentation: the verb in the verse is ashfaqna, "they were fearful of it". The preacher drew attention to the tone: the heavens and the mountains decline out of humility, not out of pride, and he contrasted this with refusals that come in a different context.