The First to Believe in Ibrāhīm
Lūṭ holds a distinction the Qur'an records in a single clause: when Ibrāhīm's own city turned on him, “Lūṭ believed him.”1 He was Ibrāhīm's nephew, and he left Mesopotamia with him — “Indeed, I will emigrate to my Lord,” Ibrāhīm said, and Lūṭ went too. The Qur'an numbers them together among those it delivered “to the land which We had blessed for the worlds.”12
Lūṭ settled afterward in the fertile plain near the Dead Sea, among cities the Qur'an leaves unnamed but the wider tradition, following the biblical account, identifies with Sodom and its neighbours. There he was given prophethood of his own, and there he confronted his people with a charge the Qur'an frames as historically unprecedented: “Do you commit such immorality as no one has preceded you with from among the worlds? Indeed, you approach men with desire, instead of women. Rather, you are a transgressing people.”3
A Preacher Among Highwaymen
The Qur'an's indictment of Lūṭ's people is broader than the single sin for which they are best remembered. He charges them with waylaying travellers on the road and with committing evil openly in their assemblies: “Indeed, you approach men and obstruct the road and commit in your meetings [every] evil.”4 They had made the crime of the powerful into a civic habit — a town where a stranger arriving at nightfall was in danger, and where the danger was public and unembarrassed.
Their answer to his preaching was not argument but expulsion: “The answer of his people was only that they said, 'Evict them from your city! Indeed, they are men who keep themselves pure.'” — mockery aimed, with the Qur'an's characteristic irony, at the very decency they found intolerable.5 And when Lūṭ pressed them, they answered with a challenge that shows how little they believed him: “Bring us the punishment of God, if you should be of the truthful.” His reply is the cry of a man alone in a city: “My Lord, support me against the corrupting people.”4
The Guests of Lūṭ
The same angels who had brought Ibrāhīm and Sārah the glad tidings of Isḥāq travelled on to Lūṭ in the form of young men, and Lūṭ, not recognising them, was seized with alarm at their arrival: “He was distressed for them and felt for them great discomfort and said, 'This is a trying day.'”6 His fear proved founded: word spread, and his people came to his door “rushing toward him,” as they had done before with other travellers.
Lūṭ pleaded with them at his door in words the Qur'an preserves with real anguish — “O my people, these are my daughters; they are purer for you. So fear God and do not disgrace me concerning my guests. Is there not among you a man of reason?” — an offer the exegetes read not as literal surrender of his children but as an appeal, in the idiom of a prophet who is father to his whole community, to lawful marriage over their intended violence.6 Their reply was flat: “You have already known that we have not concerning your daughters any claim, and indeed, you know what we want.” And Lūṭ said the sentence the Prophet ﷺ would later single out: “If only I had against you some power or could take refuge in a strong support.”6
The Prophet ﷺ, relating this, said: “May God have mercy on Lūṭ — he sought refuge in a strong support” — meaning God Himself, who was his support all along. It is a rare instance in the ḥadīth of the Prophet ﷺ commenting with open sympathy on the loneliness of an earlier messenger.7
The Overturning
At the height of the crisis the guests revealed themselves: “O Lūṭ, indeed we are messengers of your Lord; never will they reach you.” The Qur'an says the crowd was struck blind at the door — “We blotted out their eyes” — and Lūṭ was ordered out: “So set out with your family during a portion of the night and let not any among you look back, except your wife.”68
Only she was left behind, and the Qur'an is careful about why: not for being his wife, but for having sided with his enemies. She is named, with the wife of Nūḥ, in one of the Qur'an's most pointed passages on the limits of inherited righteousness — two women married to two righteous servants of God who betrayed them, and were told: “Enter the Fire with those who enter.” Against them the same passage sets the wife of Pharaoh, a believer inside a tyrant's house: neither marriage saves, nor does it condemn.9
At dawn the cities were seized: “So when Our command came, We made the highest part of it its lowest and rained upon them stones of layered hard clay, marked from your Lord.”10 The Qur'an adds a note meant for its first listeners, merchants who travelled the Syrian road: “And indeed, you pass by them in the morning and at night. Then will you not use reason?” The ruins were not a legend but a landmark — “a sign for a people who use reason” left standing where caravans went by.11