and here’s why.
Yes, we can understand the story as referring to people who practised sodomy, but if you carefully and more deeply look into the whole narrative, these people are described in the Qur’an as people who were immoral at every level.
They did not honour guests.
In fact, they made it a point that whichever foreigner fell within their grasp they would sexually assault them.
The idea that anyone that comes as a guest, or that comes seeking your hospitality, you would sexually assault them was as outrageous and morally repugnant.
As you can get within the cultural values of the many Near Eastern cultures of that time.
And one of the things that was rather interesting about them is, that when you think of something like Homosexuality, what percentage of the population is actually Homosexual?
But with these people it wasn’t that there was a percentage of them that were, but ALL of them, made a point to sodomise the foreigner to their culture.
In other words, they had an ethic of aggression, an ethic of transgression.
They did not respect people.
They did not honour people.
They are constantly described as people who are haughty and arrogant, with very little regard to anyone outside their own society.
So to reduce the problem of the people of Lut to ‘well they were Homosexual”, well what does that exactly mean?
These are people that made a point, not a percentage that were Homosexual, and acting upon something that was within their nature, but EVERYONE in that society made it a point to violate the other.
There is a difference between Homosexuality and sodomy, as a form of degrading and subjugating the other.
So in a lot of sexual cases you find that the offender makes it a point to sodomise the victim, and in every case, when you get into the psychology of the offender, it is not that they sodomise the victim because they’re Homosexual.
They sodomised the victim to degrade the victim to tell the victim, see, I am subjugating you, thoroughly and completely.
I am violating every privacy you have, and when you approach the story of Lut from that morally critical insight, then it cannot be simply reduced to an issue of Homosexuality.
There is much more involved here.
Look, they tell Lut:
“ Have we not forbidden you from receiving any visitors?”
Well now that you have visitors we must violate them.
That isn’t an issue of Homosexuality, that is an issue of a people who are criminals, and in the same way the Qur’an condemns those who are highway robbers, who victimise the defenceless, as Muslim scholars would say those who are ‘ghayr alnaas’ truly defenceless, and the Qur’an is extremely resolute saying that this is corruption on earth and that these are people that must be punished, very severely.
And so it reminds me a lot of what the people of Lut were doing.
Everything tells us that they were victimising the defenceless, degrading and humiliating the other, and so the story of Lut doesn’t provide an answer to the whole issue of Homosexuality.
It is quite disingenuous when we simply try to tell the story that it is just about Homosexuality.
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