Mona Siddiqui - 15/09/2026

“Would you mind watching my bag?” its one of the smallest acts of trust we perform with complete strangers. Someone on a train gets up and leaves their belongings with us while they go to the lavatory or to get a coffee. Usually, we don't know anything about them but they simply believe, for those few minutes, that we won’t betray their trust. And in those few minutes most of us instinctively understand that someone has put their faith in us.

In Islamic thought these moments of faith are encapsulated in the concept of amanah, not high drama or heroic gestures but the small risks of trust we take every day which I think may be the invisible glue of our moral life. In a world full of online scams, alerts and fake images perhaps the greater danger isn’t the fear of being fooled but that we stop trusting anything or anyone. It’s been reported that Tescos supermarket has become the latest household business to have been targeted by casinos that can’t legally operate in Britain. The store has been featured in ads and websites giving the false impression that it has launched its own casinos. And according to news reports sports stars including Lewis Hamilton and Jude Bellingham have also had their images used by rogue gambling firms.

The increasing fear of online scams and fake images should of course keep us alert but when this fear corrodes into a suspicion of everything and everyone, when we stop believing that anyone can tell the truth, I think that is far more dangerous for society. Every society depends upon millions of tiny acts of trust that nobody records and nobody rewards- but its these acts which show our care and generosity for one another. Technology can make deception seem easy but when suspicion becomes our default position, when we start to retreat behind our own walls and call it safety, we delude ourselves that we don’t need one other. Suspicion might keep us safe from danger but too much of it can make strangers into enemies.

And maybe the Islamic emphasis on trust in God reflects this tension between having the courage to surrender to God while remaining accountable to one another. We trust in God because we hope he will hold us. And then there is the responsibility of amanah, where we try to become people others can safely trust whether it’s holding a secret, a life, a friendship, or a stranger’s confidence on a busy train.