There was a young man who watched Ibrahim walk out of a fire unburned, and believed. When almost no one else on earth would, he did. His name was Lut, peace be upon him, the one English Bibles call Lot, and he was Ibrahim's nephew. Years later his uncle sent him north, to a cluster of towns near what we now call the Dead Sea, and there Lut found a people doing something no nation in the history of the world had done before them.
This is day fourteen of twenty-nine. It is one of the harder stories Mufti Menk tells, and he tells it with care, because the lesson lives in the hardest part: that right and wrong are not set by a crowd, and that a believer does not get to vote them away.
The boy who believed when no one else would
وَلُوطًا ءَاتَيْنَٰهُ حُكْمًا وَعِلْمًا وَنَجَّيْنَٰهُ مِنَ ٱلْقَرْيَةِ ٱلَّتِى كَانَت تَّعْمَلُ ٱلْخَبَٰٓئِثَ ۗ إِنَّهُمْ كَانُوا۟ قَوْمَ سَوْءٍ فَٰسِقِينَ
“And to Lot We gave judgement and knowledge, and We saved him from the city that was committing wicked deeds. Indeed, they were a people of evil, defiantly disobedient.”
Surah al-Anbiya 21:74 Read 21:74 with tafsir
Lut was a youngster in the days Ibrahim, peace be upon him, was thrown into the fire and came out untouched. When that happened, this young man accepted his uncle's message of the one God. Mufti Menk pauses to let the loneliness of that register: at the time there were only two who believed alongside Ibrahim, Lut and a woman named Sarah. Two people. Lut did not come to faith because everyone around him held it. He came to it against everyone around him, which is exactly the kind of man Allah would later need where He was about to send him.
Ibrahim went on north, and he sent Lut to the people of Sodom, the towns the West remembers as Sodom and Gomorrah. And when Lut arrived, Allah's own word for what he found there is not a polite one. Allah calls their deeds al-khaba'ith, the foul, the filthy, the rotten. Hold on to that, because the whole episode turns on refusing to rename it anything cleaner than what Allah named it.
A sin no nation had committed before
وَلُوطًا إِذْ قَالَ لِقَوْمِهِۦٓ أَتَأْتُونَ ٱلْفَٰحِشَةَ مَا سَبَقَكُم بِهَا مِنْ أَحَدٍ مِّنَ ٱلْعَٰلَمِينَ
“And [We had sent] Lot when he said to his people, "Do you commit such immorality as no one has preceded you with from among the worlds [i.e., peoples]?"”
Surah al-A'raf 7:80 Read 7:80 with tafsir
The men of these towns had turned away from the women Allah created as their mates and turned toward each other, openly, and it had become the custom of the place. Lut put it to them plainly, and the Qur'an preserves his words: do you approach men with desire instead of women? You are a people who have transgressed every limit. He held the mirror up: this is a thing the world has never seen until you.
Mufti Menk lingers here for a reason. Some today, he says, even claim to have studied the Qur'an and then argue it only forbids the coercion, not the act itself when both agree. He answers it from the verse itself: when Lut tells them they leave the women for the men, he is not saying go and force the women instead. The objection collapses the moment you read what Lut actually said. The deed is the deed, and Allah calls it fahishah, gross indecency, and qawmun musrifun, a people gone past all bounds. Mufti Menk also dismisses the excuse that it is something in the genes, something inherited and so unchosen: by that logic, he says, the man addicted to adultery or to drink could plead the same, and every sin on earth would dissolve into an alibi. No one is born owing this. It is a choice a heart makes and then defends.
I ask you no wage
أَتَأْتُونَ ٱلذُّكْرَانَ مِنَ ٱلْعَٰلَمِينَ
“Do you approach males among the worlds”
Surah ash-Shu'ara 26:165 Read 26:165 with tafsir
وَتَذَرُونَ مَا خَلَقَ لَكُمْ رَبُّكُم مِّنْ أَزْوَٰجِكُم ۚ بَلْ أَنتُمْ قَوْمٌ عَادُونَ
“And leave what your Lord has created for you as mates? But you are a people transgressing."”
Surah ash-Shu'ara 26:166 Read 26:166 with tafsir
Like every prophet before him, Lut asked for nothing. When they accused him of coming to their town only to gain something from them, he answered as Nuh and Hud and Salih had answered before: I am a trustworthy messenger to you, so fear Allah and obey me, and I ask of you no wage for it, my reward is only with the Lord of the worlds. Not a coin, not a thing of gold or silver. He wanted their souls, not their pockets.
And the sin was never only the one. The Qur'an names the rest: they were highwaymen who lay in wait for the traveller and robbed him on the road, and in their gathering places, their clubs, they would meet to cheer one another on in evil and commit it in the open. A whole society had organised itself around indecency and made it the entertainment of the town. Lut stood in the middle of it, alone, calling them back, year after year, while they laughed and called him mad.
When the forbidden becomes the law of the land
وَمَا كَانَ جَوَابَ قَوْمِهِۦٓ إِلَّآ أَن قَالُوٓا۟ أَخْرِجُوهُم مِّن قَرْيَتِكُمْ ۖ إِنَّهُمْ أُنَاسٌ يَتَطَهَّرُونَ
“But the answer of his people was only that they said, "Evict them from your city! Indeed, they are men who keep themselves pure."”
Surah al-A'raf 7:82 Read 7:82 with tafsir
Notice what their society had become, because this is the part that should reach across the centuries and touch you. They had so completely inverted right and wrong that purity itself was now the offence. Throw these people out, they said, they keep themselves clean. Being decent was the crime. They had even passed a rule among themselves that Lut was not allowed to host a single guest, because a guest was prey. Wrong was not just permitted; it was protected by law, and right was the thing you got punished for.
Here Mufti Menk turns it on us, and so will we. As Muslims we are not free, and we say that as a boast, not a complaint. We chose to surrender, and the day you surrender you accept a code. He gives the image of citizenship: live in a country and you cannot simply break its laws and stay a citizen in good standing. Islam is like that. You may sin and stay a Muslim, weak and in need of repentance, but the moment you take a thing Allah forbade and rebrand it as permitted, you have tried to edit the law you swore to keep. This is the heart of halal and haram: they are Allah's to define, not the crowd's, not the era's, not the syllabus a society decides to teach its children. A whole nation calling something normal does not move it one inch on Allah's scale. The people of Lut are the proof, preserved in the Qur'an forever, that the majority can be wrong about everything that matters.
I detest your deeds, and a du'a in the open
قَالَ إِنِّى لِعَمَلِكُم مِّنَ ٱلْقَالِينَ
“He said, "Indeed, I am, toward your deed, of those who detest [it].”
Surah ash-Shu'ara 26:168 Read 26:168 with tafsir
رَبِّ نَجِّنِى وَأَهْلِى مِمَّا يَعْمَلُونَ
“My Lord, save me and my family from [the consequence of] what they do."”
Surah ash-Shu'ara 26:169 Read 26:169 with tafsir
Lut never softened. I am, he told them, of those who utterly detest what you do; I want no part of it and I never will. He warned them, again and again, that a punishment was coming from Allah. And when a warner warns a people long enough and they will not bend, the Qur'an records the same chilling reply it records from other doomed nations: their only answer was to dare him, bring us the punishment of Allah, if you are telling the truth.
So Lut did the one thing a servant can always do when the whole world stands against him. He raised his hands. My Lord, save me and my family from what they do. My Lord, support me against this corrupting people. Mufti Menk asks us to feel the arithmetic of that prayer: one man, and two daughters who believed with him. Three souls in a city of thousands, and the rest of them, in the Qur'an's own description, blind, no longer able to tell right from wrong at all. When you are that outnumbered, the prophets show you the move. You stop arguing with the crowd and you start talking to the only One whose verdict will hold.
Guests too beautiful to be safe
وَجَآءَهُۥ قَوْمُهُۥ يُهْرَعُونَ إِلَيْهِ وَمِن قَبْلُ كَانُوا۟ يَعْمَلُونَ ٱلسَّيِّـَٔاتِ ۚ قَالَ يَٰقَوْمِ هَٰٓؤُلَآءِ بَنَاتِى هُنَّ أَطْهَرُ لَكُمْ ۖ فَٱتَّقُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ وَلَا تُخْزُونِ فِى ضَيْفِىٓ ۖ أَلَيْسَ مِنكُمْ رَجُلٌ رَّشِيدٌ
“And his people came hastening to him, and before [this] they had been doing evil deeds. He said, "O my people, these are my daughters; they are purer for you. So fear Allāh and do not disgrace me concerning my guests. Is there not among you a man of reason?"”
Surah Hud 11:78 Read 11:78 with tafsir
Allah's answer to the du'a came walking into town. Three guests, in the form of strikingly handsome young men, the most beautiful anyone there had seen. They were angels, though Lut did not yet know it. His daughters saw them first and ran to their father in fear, because they knew exactly what their city would do to such guests after dark. Lut rushed the men into his house and bolted the door, hoping against hope that no one had seen, and even as he hosted them he kept telling them, with a heavy heart, how vile his people were, half as a warning to leave, half in shame at what he could not protect them from.
But his own wife betrayed him. She was not a believer, and she slipped word out to the town: three beautiful men are in Lut's house. The Qur'an pairs her elsewhere with the wife of Nuh as a warning that even a prophet's household is no guarantee of faith. The mob came running, hammering on the door, and Lut stood between them and his guests in an agony you can feel through the verse: fear Allah, do not disgrace me before my guests, is there not one right-minded man among you? He even offered them the lawful path of marriage to the women of his community, calling them my daughters. They did not want what was pure. We know, they sneered, exactly what we want. He was almost helpless. If only, he cried, I had the strength to stop you, or some mighty support to lean on.
The towns turned upside down
فَلَمَّا جَآءَ أَمْرُنَا جَعَلْنَا عَٰلِيَهَا سَافِلَهَا وَأَمْطَرْنَا عَلَيْهَا حِجَارَةً مِّن سِجِّيلٍ مَّنضُودٍ
“So when Our command came, We made the highest part [of the city] its lowest and rained upon them stones of layered hard clay, [which were]”
Surah Hud 11:82 Read 11:82 with tafsir
The mighty support he wished for was already inside the house. The guests spoke at last: O Lut, we are messengers of your Lord. They will never reach you. Take your family and leave by night, and let none of you look back, except your wife, for what strikes them will strike her. Their appointed time is the morning, and is the morning not near? So Lut left in the dark with his daughters, and the dawn came up on the towns for the last time.
Mufti Menk walks the punishment through in three blows, each one named in the Qur'an. First a single, shattering cry at sunrise, a sound so vast it shook them where they stood. Then the angel Jibril, peace be upon him, returned to his true form, the form the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ described as having six hundred wings, and with the tip of one wing he reached beneath the whole settlement, lifted it high into the sky, and turned it over, so that the top became the bottom and the bottom the top. And then, as the wreckage fell, came the third blow: a rain of stones of baked clay, each one marked, falling in order, one after another, until in moments nothing of that people was left. One of those stones was for the wife who looked back.
A sign left on a road still travelled
قَالُوٓا۟ إِنَّآ أُرْسِلْنَآ إِلَىٰ قَوْمٍ مُّجْرِمِينَ
“They said, "Indeed, we have been sent to a people of criminals”
Surah adh-Dhariyat 51:32 Read 51:32 with tafsir
مُّسَوَّمَةً عِندَ رَبِّكَ لِلْمُسْرِفِينَ
“Marked in the presence of your Lord for the transgressors."”
Surah adh-Dhariyat 51:34 Read 51:34 with tafsir
Before they ever reached Sodom, those same angels had stopped with Ibrahim, who served them a roasted calf and grew afraid when they would not eat. They told him his wife would bear a son, Ishaq, peace be upon him, and they told him their errand. Ibrahim, ever tender, began to plead for Lut's people, until he was told gently to let it go: the decree had been sealed. And the angels named their cargo, the verses Mufti Menk loves to recite from the opening of the twenty-seventh part of the Qur'an: we are sent to a criminal people, to send down on them stones of clay, marked by your Lord for those who broke all bounds. When they reached the town they found, as they said, but one house of those who had surrendered to Allah, and they brought its people out. Lut, peace be upon him, returned to his uncle to tell him what had happened, and was amazed to find Ibrahim already knew.
Then Allah did something with the ruin. He left it. He says elsewhere that the wreck of those towns lies on a road that people still pass, by day and by night, so that travellers who fear a painful punishment would see it and take heed. Mufti Menk's point lands hard for us: in Lut's day this evil was one small pocket of the earth, and Allah overturned it. Today whole nations promote it, fund it, teach it, and reward it, and still it remains exactly what Allah called it. Perhaps, he says, it is only the handful of believers scattered among the cities that holds the punishment back. The Qur'an keeps Lut's towns in front of us for the same reason it kept the rubble visible: so that no believer is ever fooled into thinking that when the whole world renames a sin, the sin has changed. It has not. Allah's halal and haram outlast every empire that votes against them.