Lut: Difference between revisions

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The detail of Lut offering up his two daughters to the crowd of rapists ({{Quran-range|15|67|71}} and {{Quran-range|11|77|79}}) is a detail from the original story (the Bible, Genesis 19:8) which has survived the Islamification of the text and story. In the original story, the angels sent by YHVH to Lot's houses are Lot's guests, and Lot as a good Middle Eastern host is required to offer them good hospitality and protection, while the wicked men of Sodom and Gomorrah accost their house demanding to rape them, which is not a very hospitable thing to do. Although to later readers and listeners the salient point of the story appeared to be the lust of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah to rape other men, in fact a close reading of the original text of Genesis appears to cast their prime sin as inhospitality to guests and foreigners: Lot offers his daughters because he is a righteous man who takes care of foreign visitors as a good guest should, even at the cost of his own daughters' precious virginity. His willingness to sacrifice his daughters to the rapist mob is proof of his good hospitality, while the mob's insistence on raping these guests while they had perfectly good virgin daughters available for rape points to their wickedness and total lack of any morals whatsoever. In the Qur'anic version, though, by which time the homosexuality of the people of Lut has evolved into their prime sin, this gesture makes little sense since purely homosexual rapists would theoretically have no interest in his daughters (and the offering up of the daughters to be raped likely appeared as strange to the first generations of Muslims as it does to modern readers). It survival shows its salience in the original story, even if devoid of context here.
The detail of Lut offering up his two daughters to the crowd of rapists ({{Quran-range|15|67|71}} and {{Quran-range|11|77|79}}) is a detail from the original story (the Bible, Genesis 19:8) which has survived the Islamification of the text and story. In the original story, the angels sent by YHVH to Lot's houses are Lot's guests, and Lot as a good Middle Eastern host is required to offer them good hospitality and protection, while the wicked men of Sodom and Gomorrah accost their house demanding to rape them, which is not a very hospitable thing to do. Although to later readers and listeners the salient point of the story appeared to be the lust of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah to rape other men, in fact a close reading of the original text of Genesis appears to cast their prime sin as inhospitality to guests and foreigners: Lot offers his daughters because he is a righteous man who takes care of foreign visitors as a good guest should, even at the cost of his own daughters' precious virginity. His willingness to sacrifice his daughters to the rapist mob is proof of his good hospitality, while the mob's insistence on raping these guests while they had perfectly good virgin daughters available for rape points to their wickedness and total lack of any morals whatsoever. In the Qur'anic version, though, by which time the homosexuality of the people of Lut has evolved into their prime sin, this gesture makes little sense since purely homosexual rapists would theoretically have no interest in his daughters (and the offering up of the daughters to be raped likely appeared as strange to the first generations of Muslims as it does to modern readers). It survival shows its salience in the original story, even if devoid of context here.


==Conclusion==


The story of Lut in the Qur'an represents its apotheosis in all of the traditions in which it is found: by the 7th century, the original story of Lot, the single righteous man of Sodom who protected his guests even at the cost of his own begotten daughters virginity, has evolved into a tale simply demonizing homosexuality. Although the loss of the point of the original story is striking in the Qur'anic text, and the tasfirs which evolved surrounding it, which also build out the story by clarifying that the women of Sodom and Gomorrah were also homosexuals and thus also deserved to be destroyed, the transformation of the story of Lot into a condemnation of homosexuality is not without precedent: witness the English slur "sodomite", pointing like the Arabic "luti" to the sin of the people of Lot within the English-speaking Christian tradition.


{{Core Homosexuality}}
{{Core Homosexuality}}
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