Using a deposited item without its owner's permission

A question about using a laptop that a travelling friend had left with the questioner for safekeeping, in which Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyya answered that the device is an unpaid deposit that remains a trust until it is returned, and that using it without the owner's knowledge and permission is forbidden, since that would breach the deposit contract and betray the trust. ¹

The questioner said that her friend had travelled abroad for three months and, before leaving, had left a new laptop with her to keep until she returned, and that her own laptop had since broken beyond repair; she asked whether she may use her friend's device without her knowledge. ¹

Dar al-Ifta began by explaining that sharia came to protect rights and deposits and to safeguard trusts, making this one of its highest overall purposes, on which people's welfare rests on foundations of justice and confidence, so that the texts of the Qur'an and the Sunna repeatedly command the delivery of trusts to their owners and warn against betrayal, in al-Nisa 4:58 and al-Anfal 8:27 and in the hadith of Abu Hurayra, 'deliver the trust to the one who entrusted you, and do not betray the one who betrayed you', recorded by Abu Dawud and al-Tirmidhi. ¹

It then explained that when a person entrusts an item of his property to another to keep and return in kind on demand, without payment, this is an unpaid deposit, defined by al-Khatib al-Shirbini in Mughni al-Muhtaj (4/125) as an appointment to keep an owned or protected item in a specified manner, and by article 718 of Egypt's Civil Code 131 of 1948 as a contract by which a person undertakes to receive a thing from another, to keep it and to return it in kind. ¹ It said the deposit is one of the trust contracts whose permissibility is agreed on, since people need it when travel, illness or other circumstances prevent them from guarding their property themselves, and quoted Ibn Qudama in al-Mughni (6/436) that the scholars of every age agreed that depositing and taking deposits are permitted, because people need it and cannot all keep their property themselves. ¹

It ruled that a depositary's use of the deposit without the owner's express or implied permission is forbidden in sharia by the consensus of the scholars of the community and a clear departure from what the deposit contract requires, because the depositary's possession is one of pure trust that gives him nothing but the duty to keep the item and return it, and that using it is a form of encroaching on other people's property, citing the hadith of Amr ibn Yathribi al-Damri from the Prophet ﷺ's sermon at Mina, that nothing of a brother's property is lawful to a man except what he willingly gives, recorded by Ahmad in the Musnad. ¹ It quoted Ibn al-Mundhir in al-Ishraf (6/336) on the scholars' consensus that the depositary is barred from using the deposit, al-Nawawi in Rawdat al-Talibin (6/334), who counted benefiting from and using the deposit as the sixth cause of negligence in keeping it, article 711 of Muhammad Qadri Pasha's Murshid al-Hayran (p. 116), that the depositary may not use or benefit from the deposit without its owner's permission, and the second paragraph of article 719 of the Civil Code, that he may not use it unless the depositor permits him expressly or by implication. ¹ It concluded that the friend's leaving her new device for safekeeping until her return is an unpaid deposit, a valid contract, that the device remains a trust until it is returned, and that using it without her knowledge and permission is forbidden, since that would breach the deposit contract and betray the trust, incurring sin. ¹

Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyya published this fatwa on dar-alifta.org as no. 8990, on details page 24231, among the fatwas of the Grand Mufti Nazir Muhammad Ayyad, dated 17 June 2026, in the manners and ethics category. ¹ The museum records this text as a historical document attributed to the body or scholar that issued it; it issues no ruling of its own.