Lūṭ (Lot) — لوط

Lūṭ believed in Ibrāhīm and migrated with him, and was later sent as a messenger to the people of the cities of the plain. The Qur'an frames their crime in terms it uses nowhere else in quite the same way: "Do you commit such immorality as no one has preceded you in from among the worlds?" — men approaching men with desire instead of women, cutting off the road, and committing evil in their gatherings openly.

Lūṭ's call to them, like every prophet's call, began with the foundation of tawḥīd, but moved directly to confront the specific corruption that defined his people: he named their transgression plainly and asked them, with something close to exasperation, why they had abandoned the wives Allah had created for them, insisting they were a people going beyond all bounds.

Their answer to him was not denial of the charge but a demand to expel him and his family, on the grounds, spoken with open mockery, that they were people who kept themselves pure. The Qur'an lets the irony stand without comment: the very thing that should have been their reproach — a wish for purity — was thrown back at Lūṭ and his household as an accusation, as though decency itself were the crime.

When angels came to Lūṭ in the form of handsome young men, his fear for their safety among his people was acute, and he said in evident distress, "This is a difficult day." His people came rushing toward his house, and in his anguish he offered them his daughters in marriage as the lawful alternative, and pleaded with them to fear Allah and not disgrace him in front of his guests, asking plainly, "Is there not among you a right-minded man?"

In his most exposed moment, alone before a mob with no clan of his own in the city to shield him, Lūṭ uttered a line that later scholars have read as one of the most human moments granted to a prophet in the Qur'an: "If only I had strength against you or could take refuge in a strong support." The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is reported to have said that Allah showed mercy to Lūṭ for that statement, for he had indeed taken refuge in a support mightier than any clan — his Lord — even as he spoke from evident human strain.

It was at that point that his guests revealed themselves as angels and told him plainly that his people could not reach him, instructing him to travel with his family in the last part of the night without any of them looking back, except his wife, who was told she would meet the fate the others met, because she had sided with them in disbelief rather than with her husband in faith.

At sunrise the judgment fell: a mighty cry seized them, their settlements were turned upside down, and they were rained upon with stones of baked clay, layered one upon another, marked by their Lord — a punishment the Qur'an notes is never far from those who commit similar wrong. Lūṭ's wife, who had lagged behind out of loyalty to her people rather than her husband, was struck along with them.

The Qur'an repeatedly instructs its listeners that the ruins of these cities lie along a route still travelled by later generations, a visible sign for those who reflect and a plain warning against every attempt to reason away a corruption because it has become customary. What is preserved of Lūṭ's story is therefore not a distant myth but, in the Qur'an's own insistence, a landmark within reach of anyone willing to look.