The Satanic Brackets
The Story of Lut the Sodomite in Translation
The Qur’an warns us about few things quite as much as it warns us about the liquidators of the religion. Practically the first thing discussed in Surah al Baqarah, from 2:6, is that “There are some who say: ‘We believe in Allah and in the Last Day,’ while in fact they do not believe… Whenever they are told: ‘Do not spread mischief on earth,’ they say: ‘Why! We indeed are the ones who set things right.’”
When I go to directly talk about this, I realise that probably a more internet-popular literalist reading of that passage than mine is that there are people who don’t Really big-B Believe in their hearts in the sense of thinking angels are real and that’s the main thing they’re doing wrong. To fix it, we get them to Believe.
But my heart when reading this has always focused on the hypocrisy: the semantics of “belief” aside, what the hypocrites are doing is actually changing the situation so dramatically that it’s one of the first things the Qur’an warns a new Muslim about: not everybody who says they’re your friend actually is, and you have to use your better judgement because some of the people who will try to stake claims on you are the people who “break the covenant of Allah after its firm binding, and cut asunder what Allah has commanded to be joined, and spread mischief on earth.” Twice now we’ve mentioned mischief on earth. Furthermore, there’s nothing we can do to stop this absolutely — it’s going to be so persistent an issue moving forward that if someone halfway around the world 1440 years from now in some place the Arabs have never heard of decides to become a Muslim, it needs to be in the Book and the first thing they see.
It’s always struck me as a serious contrast that the Qur’an itself has such a profound emphasis on this, with the theme appearing over and over and over again, yet Muslims ourselves, at least in the English speaking world, are in a major crisis where our information comes from any self-proclaimed “scholar”, maybe any self-proclaimed “scholar”’s dad, maybe your dad, or maybe from hired clowns on MEMRI or Islamqa, or social media influencers who can afford to continually build their platforms due to mysterious sources of money even after it comes out that they’re sexting their students, or debate bros with no religious qualification whatsoever and the mannerisms of a drunk football hooligan, or guys who think that it’s haraam for women to recite Qur’an where men can hear it, or any twenty year old with a beard, or maybe twitter mansplainers who were fine with everything Saudi Arabia does up until that Pitbull concert last month.
It is as if none of us ever learned to question where our knowledge comes from or how we came about it or how it is changed by the mode of transmission or what we should do with it once we have it. That’s what I want to talk about, actually. This field of knowledge is called epistemology. We’re going to be using this word a lot and I don’t want to hear anything about how it’s too big. If you didn’t know it before now you do and we’re going to keep talking about it. It’s important.
So we have all these sources of information, but we talk about how the Qur’an had such physical weight that only a few sahaba dared to memorise more than a few surahs lest they overtax their body. We talk about how when the Prophet* received a revelation his camel, an animal capable of carrying burdens of up to half a ton across a scorching desert, would have to stop moving because it couldn’t carry him. But when we see some idiot throwing something around on social media to win an argument it’s like none of us know any better than to believe him when he says it’s Qur’an. But if it were really Qur’an, he would be better off trying to throw a piano at us than to treat it it like that, because we know that real Qur’an is something heavy. Whatever he’s throwing around, it isn’t Qur’an, it’s therefore something of a far lesser status.
We need to have a talk about epistemology. Our lack of serious analysis of it is something that corrupts our religion. This is malice on the parts of some of us and negligence on the parts of others, however, we need to collectively address it. It is binding on all of us to vet the information that comes our way — what was the point of making our Prophet* such an exemplar if we’re all just going to take feel-good market nonsense from anyone with a beard? Most of our debates that we think are about religion or what “it says in Islam” really stem from our, that is, specifically the English-speaking Muslims, complete illiteracy in the field of epistemology.
As a case study, I am going to be drawing heavily on the case study of “homosexuality”, a category we’ll problematise. This is just because of my own experiences. I have spent my life dodging this question, I think it’s a waste of everybody’s time. But under the constant pressure of it, I have formed a thorough critique of our discourses that goes beyond the misleading rhetorical traps set for me by charlatans and social climbers, and I now intend to take an arrow straight to the heart of the thing. Without addressing the root issue of epistemic illiteracy, the answer to this and many other religious questions remains completely obscured. I am not the only victim of this but on the contrary we are all behaving oddly and saying nonsense. Due to this we end up with frequently nonsensical discourses around many or even most basic questions of life, including some which, if consistently adopted, require an individual(!) to undergo egregious, difficult, and even dangerous austerities in order to be the best Muslim ever the way we would buy more expensive skinny jeans to prove that we’re the best goths or listen to a band’s earlier albums to prove that we were the first, true fans. But addressing the root issue reveals the question to sit atop a house of cards which is easily toppled, sitting as it does on a flimsy shelf nailed to an unmaintained portion of the siding of our religion.
The superiority of ease over austerity in religion is something frequently stressed in Qur’an and hadith literature, and I do not need to overburden the introduction by stressing excessively what we have all heard and all know is true.
i. The doubtful and the certain in religion.
On the authority Abi Ab’dillahi al-Nu’man ibn Basheer (ra) who said: I heard the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) say: “That which is lawful is clear and that which is unlawful is clear and between the two of them are doubtful [or ambiguous] matters about which not many people are knowledgeable. Thus, he who avoids these doubtful matters certainly clears himself in regard to his religion and his honor. But he who falls into the doubtful matters falls into that which is unlawful like the shepherd who pastures around a sanctuary, all but grazing therein. In the body there is a morsel of flesh which, if it be sound, all the body is sound and which, if it be diseased, all the body is diseased. This part of the body is the heart.”
We’re going to talk in a little bit about the legalism behind traditional interpretations of passages like this one. But not right away. For now it will be enough to address the popular interpretation of this, which is a prescriptive reading that if something is even a little possible to be haraam just don’t do it. I don’t like this interpretation at all.
This interpretation puts me — and anyone arguing for leniency on any issue — on a disadvantageous footing, although ease, as we have acknowledged, is an excellent principle on its own. But some claim that this hadith means that if something is even arguably haraam it should be avoided. So if anyone starts an argument, as an example of a ridiculous argument someone could make, I haven’t seen this one yet alhamdulila, but if someone did make an argument about green paint being haraam because green is the colour of paradise so it’s shirk to paint your house green, a person has to become well-versed enough in Sharia to dispute that before green paint becomes halal to them because this weird person has presented a doubt to them. So this person, maybe he is illiterate or a recent convert being fooled by some politician or influencer. So under this interpretation he doesn’t have the ability to contest this doubt.
This interpretation is really a crazy usurpation of power by which a layman claims the authority to mandate any number of ridiculous prohibitions (always prohibitions, because those can be easily used as an outwardly obvious indicator and people can easily compete with each other on who can observe more prohibitions while things like principle and decision making are more problematic to gauge quickly) and a poor or uneducated or simply confused person has no defence against this because the confused victim is aware of her own lack of religious credentials while the debate bro is quite confident that he has his own for whatever reason.
In a debate, this is a clever device for putting on an ever-increasing burden of proof against one’s opponent. The average person, however, who is not in a debate and thinks debates are childish, will only become frustrated at this behaviour which is based on circular logic to begin with. The average person sees that anyone can start an argument, and ignores the person attempting to do so as the Qur’an will encourage them to do. It takes someone raised in a cave, wholly uneducated or egregiously prideful, to pick up the gauntlet after such a challenge, knowing, obviously, that it is a trap. I happen to be this, so I will continue.
In our case study, this premise is often used to argue that for example being gay is, if not explicitly condemned, “doubtful”, and should therefore be avoided. This is the less popular argument against gay people (lol), but since this is an essay about epistemology, which employs the case study of gay people, and not an essay about gay people, we’re going to address it first because it’s the more basic epistemological problem.
I am able to turn this argument to my advantage only by pointing out that there are practical aspects to a wholesale prohibition on what we’ll for now, begrudgingly, call “homosexuality” — an imprecise and stupid term that gay people don’t really use to describe anything. Nobody thinks they’re going around committing the act of homosexuality. That’s just not how people talk. (Source: I’m gay.)
There are two scientific facts which are not in any doubt. First, that some people just are gay. This is a matter of complete scientific consensus. He who thinks that it is religious duty to disbelieve matters of scientific consensus, wrote the uncontested intellectual heavyweight Ghazali, in his Incoherence of the Philosophers,
“is really unjust to religion, and weakens its cause. For these things have been established by evidence which leaves no room for doubt. If you tell a man who has studied these things — so that he has sifted all the data relating to them, and is, therefore, in a position to forecast when a lunar or solar eclipse will take place, whether it will be total or partial, and how long it will last, that these things are contrary to religion, your assertion will shake his faith in religion, not in these things.”
He goes on to say,
“The atheists would have the greatest satisfaction if the supporter of religion made a positive assertion that things of this kind are contrary to religion. For then it would be easier for them to refute the religion which stood or fell with its opposition to these things. It is, therefore, necessary for the supporter of religion not to commit himself on these questions.”
In other words, it can’t be “your religion” that grass is orange.
Since the fact that gay people are gay is very well known to gay people — at least as well as the timing of the eclipse is to a medieval astrologer — there is no need to labour on it. Trying to convince a gay person that religion stands or falls by the existence or nonexistence of gay people is ridiculous as far as gay people are concerned, and as a person who wants people to convert to my religion whether they are gay or straight this is not an amenable proposition to me and I cannot adopt it as my creed. The outcome of this insistence can only be the expulsion of gay people from the religion, which is a desirable outcome only for an atheist.
If we define a gay person as a person who would be harmed or be made participant in harming another (for instance, a man who once taking a heterosexual wife is unable to fulfill her rights, or a person who must lie to their family about their sexual orientation going so far as to fabricate an entire marriage of convenience — we call that lying, by the way) by being forced to choose between celibacy and a heterosexual lifestyle, it is considered quite scientifically certain that such people exist. The only real opposition to this consensus comes by people who are openly unconcerned with scientific evidence and consider that their religion stands or falls by whatever nonsense the influencers tell them. There is no need to take the arguments of such people into consideration. Gay people exist.
Insistence to the contrary is a dangerous trap. A gay person who accepts the argument — who is bullied into it or compelled or fooled — but is also aware of the harms of things like conversion therapy or entering into marriages of convenience — then understands that, in order to avoid causing harms to themselves, their families, their would-be spouses, etc — all very Islamic objectives — they are obligated to apostatise from Islam in order to do so.
This isn’t some ridiculous false conclusion. If LGBT people and religion must fight to the elimination of one or the other then there must be means and tools which are employed by religion in bringing about this objective. Something is not obligatory if it is impossible. The first means available is the prescription of celibacy and the second is to try to get gay people to not be gay anymore. These are really pretty much the same, and I believe both are classed as conversion therapy in most places where conversion therapy is (rightly) illegal. In both cases, we have a wealth of scientific literature which demonstrates that harm is done by these things. Now in the same sense, if we suppose a wise and just ruler, and I go up to him and say, religion stands or falls by you implementing a policy which is demonstrably harmful, will this ruler pick religion or will he pick ruling? If he picks religion he will cease to be a wise and just ruler. Therefore, religion is obligated to not stand or fall by unjust rulership, since religion prefers to see itself — or at least I prefer to see religion — as a proper guide to a just ruler.
Therefore we see that the proposition that a gay person should “avoid what is doubtful”, that is, “the act of homosexuality” is not merely a recommendation of avoidance, but if implemented and taken to its conclusion actually involves means of compulsion about which, to say the least, serious doubt exists! In avoiding what is doubtful, certainly one includes conversion therapy under that unless one is insane.
Is it haraam to subject people by force to something that is proven both ineffective and obviously harmful, that is, attempts at conversion of their sexual orientation or enforced celibacy? Obviously it is. But that is the position we’re dealing with! It is the only way to make sense of it.
Speaking of doubt, this translation of this hadith (as far as I can tell, the only widespread one) is something that presents a great deal of doubt, because the entire second half of it goes on to refute this entire interpretation. The shepherd doesn’t graze in the sanctuary, because his heart is fine, so he’s fine. It doesn’t go on to say “therefore, don’t do anything about which doubt exists”, it says keep your heart clear and be careful. But that is an aside.
ii. The Satanic Brackets
One of the most popular “translations” of the Qur’an in English is Muhammad Asad’s. Examine his rendition of 15:71–72:
[Lot] said: “[Take instead] these daughters of mine, if you must do [whatever you intend to do]!” (15:72) [But the angels spoke thus:] “As thou livest, [O Lot, they will not listen to thee:] behold, in their delirium [of lust] they are but blindly stumbling to and fro!”
We can make quite significant changes to it via the elimination of the bracketed insertions:
Said: “These daughters of mine, if you must do!” (15:72) “As thou livest, behold, in their delirium they are but blindly stumbling to and fro!”
This is a problem because what the brackets actually mean is that the translator has added content which, by his own confession, did not exist and was not clear in the original. The Prophet* wasn’t allowed to do this, but apparently they are. That is to say, by Asad’s attestation, 15:72 merely says that Lut’s people were stumbling in delirium while Asad finds it neceessary to tell us what Allah does not, that the delirium was of lust.
This scene has presented a problem not just to translators of the Qur’an but also Christian and Jewish commentators on and translators of the Hebrew bible. As presented here, the people of Lut approach his house in a crazed lust and Lut — this has never raised a warning flag to anyone, not even those who claim to believe that prophets are necessarily moral exemplars — simply throws his daughters at them! What kind of father does that? Wouldn’t you want to take your daughters away from that situation? Is the crime of the people of Lut their disinterest in gang raping his daughters, as per his suggestion? Call me a Sodomite, but I am not interested in doing that either!
This reading is insane, and it’s absolutely absurd that there are real people in the world who seem to believe that these are some of the most legislatively important verses in the Qur’an which should dictate the sexual norms of all Muslims, while also upholding the interpretation that they portray Lut, aleyhis salam, father exemplar, as throwing his daughters at a lust-crazed rape gang literally currently attempting a gang rape, literally begging them to “do [whatever you intend to do]”.
This is not just a Muhammad Asad problem, although this particular verse demonstrates well what I’m getting at, in terms of epistemology, which is what this article is about. In addition to Muhammad Asad’s, I spent a bit of time yesterday reviewing the ayat about Lut, aleyhis salam, through the fifteen translations that are available on quran.com. In fact in all of them none of the translators actually seem to understand what is happening in the scene they’re translating. The form of translation, though, requires them to go cover-to-cover, drawing opinions, however uninformed, on every single thing they see in the book. Far from Imam Malik who famously said that the shield of the scholar is “I don’t know”. This is a gravely irresponsible practice.
I repeat again that this is what is claimed as the mainstream interpretation. The fact that the people who wish to portray Islam as a religion of gang rapists and daughter-sellers — and there are many, as we know — have not honed in the fact that there are people who consider THIS story, as presented, to be one of colossal legislative importance and a portrayal of exemplary morality, is a mercy of Allah that our enemies, though they have infinite money and the most developed media and military infrastructure in world history by an unfathomable margin — are just spectacularly unobservant, and the most fanatical of them hold similar views on gay people to those presented in this interpretation. No matter how crazed and deluded our detractors are (do you see how much it would change the meaning if I were to say that our detractors were deluded with lust?), the incoherence with which the absurd views of the “translators” on this series of events are presented can only be described as a miracle of Allah subhana wa ta3ala.
Surah 15 is in reality one argument. The Quraysh argued that sending a human prophet is not sufficiently miraculous. One of the most complete Qur’anic accounts of the story of Lut and his people is presented in this surah. It comes after a long discourse on the difference between sending a human prophet and sending angels to the people, and why the Qur’ans Quraysh detractors actually do not want an angel to appear before them as happened in the cases of past peoples, such as those of the people of Lut*. Like most of the mentions of Lut in the Qur’an, it is followed immediately by a discourse on Shu’ayb and the people of the forest and the mountains who also famously rejected their human prophets, so they got an angel instead which is what the Quraysh are asking for. This surah points out the issue with their doing that.
The “translations” of this surah make it appear as though a detour is taken from the main thrust of all of this to talk about butt stuff, even though this surah, itself, explains why these stories are chosen, in 15:76: the ruins of the city were still known to the arabs in revelation times, like the ruins of 3aad and Thamuud. They knew where these ruins were. They used to stay in them overnight when they were traveling through the desert. We don’t know where they were anymore, they did back then, it was common knowledge to them as much as the camels they’d ride there on. But this is clear evidence to the arabs and is a powerful argument to them — geographical proof of an earlier warning shot fired by God at their ancestors for doing what they’re doing now.
I bring up surah 15 because it allows us to examine the fact that in addition to being incoherent, the translations are not consistent with each other. This should go without saying, because if they were, we’d need only one of them. However, I once again stress our communal weakness in epistemology. We don’t know who to believe or on what level.
15:70 is a good 5–8 words depending on who’s counting. A literal translation is problematic because the Arabic is unclear, at least to me: “they said, did we not forbid you from al 3aalameen?” “Al 3aalameen” is often translated as “the worlds”, and I’m about as confused on what it’s doing here as anyone else, to be honest with you, I think it probably has poetic implications that are lost on me. Rather than admit their confusion, the “translators” guess about its meaning, all assuming that it must have one but disagreeing with each other on what it is. Mustafa Khattab says that they’ve forbidden Lut from protecting anyone. Fadel Soleiman says that they’ve forbidden him from receiving people, something with quite a different implication. Usmani has them saying that he can’t be a guardian of the whole world, again, quite different. Abdul Haleem says he’s not allowed to interfere between them and anyone else. Muhammad Hijab says that he’s forbidden from having contact with anyone in the universe. Yusuf Ali says he’s forbidden to “speak for all and sundry” while in Maududi’s, they don’t seem to mind who he speaks for; their issue with his relationship with all and sundry is that he has been forbidden again and again to extend hospitality to them. All of these are quite different.
The mention of Lut in Surah 26 begins at ayah 160 with a clear summation of why we’re talking about him. All of the “translators” render this ayah as “the people of Lut rejected the messengers”, more or less. As the surah goes on, we arrive at 165, a heavily bracketed ayah. 4–6 words long, again, depending on who’s counting, a literal word-for-word translation might be something like: “Do you approach the males from al 3aalameen?”
Mustafa Khattab adds a word: “Why do you [men] lust after fellow men,” which, the brackets here are fair enough, this being a patriarchal society, Lut was very likely addressing the men who held power and influence over the kinds of things that went on, although by the same reckoning you could be adding [men] after practically every instance of the second person. The Maarif-ul-Quran and Usmani both feel it important to add [for having sex] even though Allah subhana wa ta’ala seems to have forgotten that detail. Maududi’s asks “what, of all creation will you go to [fornicate with] the males,” which, aside from being grammatically incorrect, does add [fornicate with], a pretty important detail. Ghali’s brackets are the weirdest of them all, making sure that we know the males of the worlds who they come up to are [stout], which has about as much basis as the rest of these.
All of them, however, agree on the basic fact that the word “males”, “al dhukraana”, is referring to men in the general, plural. Except the word “al dhukraana” is not the plural form, it is the dual. He is referring to two males — Of everyone in the world, you need these two men? This makes it clear that this isn’t a generalised criticism of their sexual preferences (again, nothing about this situation has anything to do with how gay people work at all) but, as this surah goes on to continue to attest, this conversation takes place while he is hosting his two angelic guests and his people are attempting to attack them. The interpretation that this is a generalised reference to attraction to males is completely inadmissible on linguistic grounds.
iii. What was the crime of the people of Lut?
The 40-volume History of al Tabari is widely regarded as one of or the most important histories of Islam ever produced. Its translation is also problematic, coming from UC Berkeley in 1987 and retaining problematic translation conventions pioneered in early Qur’an translations inconsistently and without the opacity of the them; in the Qur’an translations, at least, the Arabic is quite easily available. It is also often unclear when it is Tabari talking and when it is the translator. Nonetheless, it is translated, and this allows us a muddy look at the spectrum of debate that existed in Tabari’s time on this issue.
The section on Lut ibn Terah, aleyhis salam, son of Ibrahim’s brother, begins on page 111 of volume 2 and opens with a humbling, several-page discourse on this issue of what exactly it is these people did. Like Tabari’s history generally, it is a collection of narrations, some of which conflict with each other, meant to present not an authoritative account, but a reflection of the spectrum of debate that exists on these issues in his time. Far from the cartoony image that exists in internet discourse of “the scholars” getting together for tea every couple weeks to agree on everything, we find quite the spectrum.
What sticks out to me most here is that the scholars who Tabari cites actually don’t seem to have given very much weight to this issue. While we do find the position represented that it was either anal intercourse, intercourse with men, public sex in their assemblies, or forceful intercourse with travelers — all quite different from each other — other explanations are available including some pretty silly ones. They don’t seem to have given this issue much weight in Tabari’s time.
A footnote of the translation quotes a Jewish account which
lists “revolting orgies” and robbing wayfarers in a variety of ways, most of which involved some form of torture, including a procrustean bed which was either too short or too long. The hapless wayfarer was made to fit the bed by force, which often resulted in his death. It is this latter practice which is probably meant here by “they used to shorten whoever passed by them.”
Although the argument can be made that Jewish accounts carry minimal weight — which is generally true — we need to bear in mind that historically, Muslims have not invalidated the Jewish accounts of the story of Lut*, going so far as to continue to call the city Sodom although this word is found nowhere in Qur’an. The reason for this is that the story of the people of Lut was well known to both the Jews and the Arabs of the time of Revelation, and the Qur’anic account is not a radical departure in its content as it is with some other stories.
But to return to Tabari himself, he says (of course through the translator):
As for what they did in their assemblies, scholars disagree about what it was. Some say that they used to shorten whoever passed by them. Others say that they used to break wind in their assemblies, while some said that they used to have intercourse with each other there.
He does give citations, the isnad is abbreviated by the translator and several of the scholars he cites give conflicting narrations, remaining, like Tabari, neutral to pick between them, not legislating on an “act” as the salafis do but just carrying on as they’ve heard from other sources they consider reputable. Waki’, for example, carries two narrations he heard from his father, one that, according to the translator, means “cutting [the road] off” and the other which means that they used to have intercourse with men in their assemblies. He also, however, gives three others from other sources, for a total of five, one that they would have intercourse with each other (not necessarily men — my insertion) in their assemblies, and one other which says that “no male jumped upon a male before the people of Lot” and one that “they would cut off wayfarers and mock them, and that was the abomination they committed”.
Ahman b. Abdahal Dabbi tells us that Umm Hani “asked the Prophet about God’s statement, “and you commit abominations in your assemblies.” And he said, “They used to cut off wayfarers and mock them.” This is corroborated by a separate narration of Al Rabi ibn Sulayman.
According to Yunus-Ibn Wahb-Ibn Zayd: Concerning God’s statement, “And you commit abominations in your meetings,” their meetings were the assemblies, and the abomination was their disgusting act which they would perform. They would accost a rider and seize him and mount him.
According to Bishr-Yazid-Said-Qatadah: God’s statement, “And you commit abominations in your assemblies,” means they used to commit lewdness in their meetings.
As for those who said they used to break wind in their assemblies, ‘Abd al-Rahman b. al-Aswad al-Zifari heard the following from Muhammad b. Rabi’ah-Rawh b. Ghutayf al- Thagafi-’Amr b. al-Mus’ab-’Urwah b. al-Zubayr-’A’ishah: About His statement, “ And you commit abominations in your assemblies,” the abomination was breaking wind.
According to Musa b. Harlin-’Amr b. Hammad- Asbat-al-Suddi-Abu Malik and Abu Salih-Ibn ‘Abbas and Murrah al-Hamdani-Ibn Masud and some of the companions of the Messenger of God: The quote, “And you commit abominations in your assemblies,” means they would shorten everyone who passed by them, and that was the abomination.
Concerning those who said that they used to shorten whoever passed by them, Ibn Humayd heard the following from-Yahya b. Wadih-’Umar b. Abi Za’idah-’Ikrimah: Concerning His statement, “You commit abominations in your assemblies,” it means that they used to molest wayfarers, shortening those who passed by them.
There are three other narrations cited, two that their abomination was intercourse with men in their assemblies and one that it was intercourse with one another in the assembly.
Contrary to what twitter mansplainers have to say on the issue then, what exactly the crime of the people of Lut was seems to have been in a state of debate or more likely inattention for centuries.
We don’t find a consensus that the crime they committed is even a sexual crime at all, and of those who say that it’s a sex crime, we find four conflicting accounts of what that crime is, again,
- anal intercourse,
- intercourse with men,
- public sex in their assemblies, or
- forceful intercourse with travelers
You’re the one who wants to handle this like a legislative verse so let’s talk about the differences between these four things. Again, nowhere in the world is the word “homosexuality” used to refer to all four of these acts without discrimination or further clarification.
Anal intercourse can be either with men or with women. Intercourse with men may be anal or it may not. Public sex may be with men or with women, anal or otherwise, and forceful intercourse with travelers is clearly quite a different situation than all of the above because it necessarily involves non-consent while the first three may be consensual or not. Therefore we have multiple dimensions to consider if we are 100% certain that this is a sex crime, which we are not, but if we were, we would have to consider:
- the form of intercourse, whether it is anal or vaginal, etc
- whether it is with males or females or both
- whether it is consensual or not
- whether it is forceful or not
- whether it is in public assembly or not
- whether it is in groups or in twos
And the consensus of the scholars on these issues is — nonexistent. It does not exist. Period.
iv. What is actually happening?
By now I’ve demonstrated the premise I’m refuting to be unworkable several, several times over. The doubt on that interpretation is by now like the sand in the ruins of Sodom, and we know what has been said about things that are in doubt.
However, at this point in the conversation, I am quite frequently asked to issue an interpretation of my own of Lut’s verses. That anyone should at this late stage in the thing now challenge my qualification to do so really strikes me as quite odd behaviour, because in this task I have been groomed by hundreds of reminders since my mid teens by uncountable, unconnected sources that my single most important task in life is to read the ayat of Prophet Lut (as) and tell them what it says. For well over a decade this task has been able to escape my mind for hardly a week, and if a week certainly not a month, without someone or another giving me a reminder of the story of Prophet Lut as though I have been chosen since birth to be his historiciser. Resist the mantle as I may, it seems to me to be a matter of comfortably-nestled consensus. It is not an exaggeration to say that literally hundreds of people have solicited my opinion on this topic, and my lack of “traditional qualification” seems to have deterred not a single one, even when I was a literal teenager.
The only way that I can consider this matter anything but a consensus is if all of those solicitations were bad-natured harassment of a nobody with no right to an opinion. Only on that grounds is there any room to challenge my qualifications. However, I choose the more charitable interpretation of my fellow Muslims, as is my religious right and obligation. So.
The Qur’an’s stylistic reference to the people as “his nation”, qawmuhu, for example in 11:78, is significant. This means that Lut was in fact one of these people, and had some relation to them, which is why he lived there, near, but not with, his uncle Ibrahim, who was then living somewhere else, not having yet had a child and not yet having left Hajar in charge of founding Mecca with the Jurhumites.
Although Lut was a Sodomite as much as anyone else living there, and is repeatedly said to be one of them in the Qur’an, he was rejected by them. They not only didn’t consider him to be a prophet, they didn’t consider him to be a Sodomite at all. This was a major error of theirs.
Not only that, but rather than treating him as a guest or someone along those lines, they considered him to have a vastly inferior status, expressed through the following:
- They refused him the right to have guests, which is a basic marker of status and authority and would have been easily recognised as such by the Qur’an’s Arab audience as it is now.
- They refused to marry his daughters, despite his attempts to find them a husband from among them, saying “we have no rights concerning your daughters” (11:79), however, we do have rights to prohibit you the right to hospitality because you live among us in an inferior status and we do have the right to maintain that inferior status by committing atrocities as is our custom anyway.
- Immediately before they are destroyed, they actually state (7:82) that they are going to banish him from the city as punishment for violating the prohibition on harbouring guests, however, the destruction of the city prevents them from doing so.
The fact that the people of Sodom would attack vulnerable travelers is something I uphold, however, it is inessential to the point of this story as presented in Qur’an and only substantiates the Qur’an’s claim in 29:28 that they were wicked people who were indecent on an unprecedented, notorious, world-historical scale, and that this helps contextualise Lut’s conflict with them: “I despise the things you people do.” (26:168)
What is important here is the inferior status with which the people of Sodom regarded Lut and the dishonours they forced upon him, and which he refused to accept even at the threat of his life or expulsion. The reason for this social exclusion of him is not that he migrated with Ibrahim there recently, or due to a mixed heritage or something along those lines due to which he would be considered a foreigner, but because he refuses to reproduce their mode of social organisation, that is, they regard him as a goody two-shoes who would rather carry himself well than behave in that manner (7:82, 27:56). Because of this they felt shame only when he was around to shame them. They wanted their source of shame gone, so they wanted him established as inferior and if that didn’t work they were ready to throw him out of town.
Another interpretation of the twice-occurring designation “nasoon yatatahharoona”, usually translated as something like “those who purify themselves”, is that this was something used to identify what we would now call a Muslim, a follower of Ibrahim, who may have gained some level of notoriety and been identified pejoratively by their hygiene practices in the vein of “those who can be identified by their clothing” or “towelhead”, “circumcised”, etc. There’s plenty of slurs today in the same vein, identifying Muslims by one characteristic thing we do.
Either way, what is clear is that the root of his social exclusion is that he refused to participate in the central rite of the community, which was highway atrocity. Despite this, Lut (as) made attempts to integrate into the community although he could not condone their actions. He continued trying to increase his social credibility among them by marrying his daughters to men from among them, at which point he would be someone’s stepfather and entitled to a greater level of respect than he was getting. However the people refused to marry his daughters, for the same reason. They wanted him socially excluded, and if one of them had married his daughters either they too would have been socially excluded or it would have raised Lut’s status.
Regarding the unprecedented immorality spoken of in 7:80, since Lut was quite possibly the second post-deluvian Prophet after Ibrahim, this may refer to the violence of their rejection of him. Ibrahim’s people had rejected and even cast him out, but he approached them with quite a different attitude to Lut’s, and he had destroyed his father’s business as well as the sacred things of the people. They had some reasonable cause to be upset with him. By contrast, Lut approached his people seeking nothing but peace, arms outstretched, daughters to marry. No legitimate grievance with his behaviour is possible, and so his people have the honour of rejecting a prophet with an unprecedented vehemence, creating a conflict on principle rather than as a result of earlier personal offences.
Another interpretation is that Lut is speaking here figuratively, “this is the worst anybody’s ever done it, I don’t know anyone who’s ever done anything like this!” Another is what might be a more precedented interpretation favoured by the “progressive” Muslims in the western countries which is that the evil they did was a basic part of the social contract committed in the open as a guarantee of status and honour, rather than something committed in some level of secrecy, and this is what makes them the most wicked people so far in history up until that point. The reason I feel like this is the weakest of the interpretations I’ve nominated so far is because there’s no real reason to think that nobody ever committed highway robbery before them, or that Lut would know it if that was the case. We’re basically dealing with, like, a criminal tribe, which isn’t all that special.
All of these interpretations though are more admissible than simply same-sex male intercourse, which it is fairly silly to consider to have been invented any one time in any one place. In fact, if taken literally, this verse definitely means that it’s not a story about gay sex, since gay sex wasn’t invented at any point.
What Lut has to say on this matter is, “I hate the things you people do” (26:168). “You attack men, set traps in the road, and you hold meetings where you plan atrocities.” (29:29) “I’ve tried to get you to marry my daughters (15:71) who are perfectly acceptable for you, within your custom, (11:78) created as if to marry specifically one of you (26:166) but you turn away from them and instead you attack these two men who have come to me as my houseguests, out of everyone in the world.” (26:165)
I have presented a few interpretations which I feel are all acceptable, and maybe the answer is is all of them depending on who needs to get what out of the story. But my favourite interpretation is that the crime of the Sodomites was their rejection of Lut’s daughters as potential marriage partners due to the inferior status of their father. Had they persisted in this, it would have resulted in a system of strict endogamy, with Lut cast out of the city itself, living perhaps on its outskirts, and kept in an inferior status through communally agreed upon atrocities carried out against him and his family and any followers or relations they might accrue. By “purer for you” in 11:78, Lut means that his daughters would have otherwise been considered perfectly acceptable candidates for marriage according to the marriage customs of the people. By rejecting them in 11:79 in order to maintain Lut’s inferior status, what they are doing is laying the foundation for a caste system of the indian type, including permanent, hereditary sanctions.
I believe that this interpretation is corroborated in Surah Anbiya’, that is, surah 21, where it is stated that Allah does not recognise these arbitrary caste divisions between different groups of people, and will absolutely count excluded people as part of their nation even if they are unjustly stripped of that honour by the people:
(93) They cast each other out. But they will still return to Me as a whole people, (94) so whoever does good in a state of faith, I will not reject the effort. Emphatically, we will record it all.
By 97, it is established that the oppressors will say not “we were Sodomites” or “we were Quraysh” or “we were brahmins” or whatever the case may be:
(95) It is impossible for a community which We have destroyed to ever rise again, (96) until the world has been destroyed by every Gog and Magog descending from every hill (97) and the Promise has come to pass. See the lamentations in the eyes of the disbelievers: “We did not listen. We were nothing but oppressors.”
and the surah continues slightly later on:
(106) Certainly, this is a message for a people Entrusted: (107) We have sent you to be compassionate to all peoples.
that is, without discrimination of who thinks they’re better than anyone else and without validating the chauvanistic claims of any particular group:
(109) And if they turn back say, “I have warned all of you as equals, and I do not know if the Promise is near or far, (110) but without a doubt only Allah knows whether you say or you don’t. (111) And your decadent comforts may be a trial for you.”
(All renditions my own, because I’m telling you what I think my holy book says.)
In my opinion, the greatest crime of the people of Lut is their failure to recognise Lut (as) as a Sodomite. They therfore, as we were warned they would back in the beginning of Surah al Baqarah, cut asunder what Allah has commanded to be joined, and spread mischief on the Earth.
v. The Politics of “Translation”
To my mind these varying interpretations greatly enrich the verses and are made possible only by the fact that I was not interpreting the verses in order to rationalise a certain point of view, but to playfully dance with the word of God and allow it to speak to me like the living entity it is. Sometimes the opposite accusation is raised against me — that my reading conflicts with the viral Evangelical reading only because I carry my own assumptions to it. Of course this is true and I do — there are many principles according to which I interpret the meanings of the Qur’an, some of which have been described in this very paper. For example, I won’t preach the abandonment of a something certain in favour of a slapdash translation. I won’t preach things that cause obvious harm. I also won’t preach things that are a little too convenient for the hegemony of my time, with which I am at absolute and irreconcilable conflict, without serious investigation. All examples.
These are privileges which were not enjoyed by my predecessors, who were very much ingratiated to the ruling authorities of their day. Nothing is inherently wrong with this, assuming the ruling authority of your day isn’t the British empire, for example, not to call anyone out.
The crucible of the English-language discursive tradition around Islam, however, is in the British empire. It is a discourse to which Muslims ourselves are relative newcomers. Centuries-established by the time any of us could point to England on a map, that is to say, they were talking about us for a while before we noticed, the English-language discourse eventually came to include the Muslims ourselves incompletely and in successive waves.
We got our first big break, you could say, after the British established a hegemony in India and changed the language of the courts from Farsi into English. This, combined with orientalist interest, prompted what as far as I know was easily the greatest rush of translations of Farsi and Arabic texts into English. What’s important is the reason these texts were chosen and translated — it was for the sake of transforming Sharia as it was applied in the Mughal courts into something more amenable to the British legal system, so they needed these books to use as authoritative source texts. The language of the courts though was English now, so the books needed to be in English and that’s why they were translating them. Since the point of this was literally to legislate a penal code for a colonial empire, you see disproportionate emphasis on the purported thou-shalt-nots. The thou-shalt-nots became a focus with a far broader consensus than existed in the discursive traditions of other languages, especially Arabic and Farsi, both of which have significant antinomian currents, for example, because the English specifically chose to translate the things that were about all the thou-shalt-nots. It’s not to say the works with that emphasis didn’t exist, they did, but other works also existed which weren’t translated into English and with which English-speaking Muslims aren’t anywhere near as concerned today as a result. This was the foundation of the English-language discursive tradition into which the Qur’an was translated. Anything not directly tied to colonial governance was considered unimportant or even heretical and we retain this tradition today.
Nobody was translating these things thinking, oh, someone’s going to want to convert into this religion, well we’ll have books to give them then that they can build this religion off of. It was to have reference documents for the benefits of non-Muslims in positions of power over Muslims — tomes of clobber verses handed off to the colonial fuzz.
On a world-historical scale, it’s pretty weird for the early converts from a language group to have Qur’an translations ready to go for us already, let alone like a whole cottage industry of them. Because it was done so early, there wasn’t a strong discursive tradition on subjects related to translation or even a strong tradition of understanding basic Qur’anic concepts on any kind of unified cultural level, and it was fully up to the judgement of the translators what it is they want God to be saying. For centuries there have been entire Muslim-majority language groups to whom information about religion was conveyed in ways other than Qur’an translation; it would be carried by Sufis or poets like Rumi, for example, or possibly in song or something like that. They didn’t have legal documents, they had poetry that they could read and reflect on or whatever they were going to do. It wasn’t a tool for taking over the world, it was about building relationships with each other and the world or some other thing that can be done by poets. That’s the stuff we didn’t get because it was considered unimportant or heretical. There is no strong tradition of Islamic poetry in English, for example, and the history of Islamic mysticism in English is really really weird too. It’s not a religion of English-speaking hunters and pastorialists and peasants and craftsmen and poets and warriors. It’s not even really the language of English-speaking governors either which puts us in a really weird position of the religion, or at least the texts we use as a source code for it in English, being the religion of a colonial ruling class who do not, themselves, even consider it their own. It’s more correct to say our discursive tradition is something that was made for them for the sake of governing us by a handful of people who all knew each other and were pretty much in with the British governors.
Phase two then was the era of Victorian gentlemen. For the most part these fit the profile of Yusuf Ali written for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
Yusuf Ali belonged to the group of Indian Muslims from professional families who were concerned with rank and status. […] During the formative phase of his life he mingled mainly in upper-class circles, assiduously cultivating relations with members of the English élite. […] His advocacy of the dissemination of rationalist and modernist thought through secular education [was a] genuine attempt to assimilate into British society.
A Shi’a who supported the British in World War I against Turkey, married an English woman with Anglican rites, and is buried in London, his translation of the Qur’an has seen over thirty editions and is one of the most popular in the world. Mirza Abdul Fazl, another Victorian-era Shi’a, a practicing homeopath and close friend of the Butcher of Hyderabad, Jawaharlal Nehru, completed his translation in 1910. A few sources I’ve consulted consider his the first translation into English by a Muslim, and it predates Yusuf Ali’s by 24 years. It was followed by the Ahmadi leader Muhammad Ali in 1917. My intention here isn’t really to give a full run-down of the crew (though someone should), just to give a brief sketch of what kind of people we’re talking about, what their goals were, what the relationships between them were like, and what their influences might have been. As we see, they were actually a pretty eccentric bunch, and it’s goofy to grope around in this dark recess looking for this mythical “consensus of the scholars”.
During this phase we also see the first translation (that I know of) by a British convert to Islam, Marmaduke Pickthall, who finished his translation in 1930. A classmate and childhood friend of Winston Churchill, he doesn’t seriously rock the boat on the class interests represented so far and doesn’t seem to have intended his translation as a missionary document to reach the common Englishman either. In fact as a native speaker of the language I find it very difficult to follow. You need special training to follow its archaic usage of language which eludes the common person. Maybe there are some finishing school kids somewhere who can follow the literary style, but I don’t even know if that’s factually true or not.
The third phase is the current phase. The current phase is one of mass market penetration, and in this phase we see a greater number of translations being authored by all manner of eccentric groups, including the Gülenists, the “Progressive Muslims”, and other US assets but also including other groups as well. There’s a greater deal of ideological sophistication in the current phase, for example Maududi’s, which was made by a guy who thinks that the biggest problem Muslims have right now is that women go outside too much but whose extensive footnotes are nontheless illuminating and make his translation my personal favourite, if I must pick one.
In this phase we see people starting to participate in a broader discourse about things that interested Victorian orientalists less, actively drawing lines and sides on political and social debates such as Maududi’s emphasis on feminism. There is still, however, a major barrier to entry, with the bulk of these translations being printed in Saudi Arabia and subject to a strict but goofy set of standards. For instance, Saudi Arabia won’t publish anyone who doesn’t natively speak a dialect of modern Arabic, an arbitrary and racist restriction that limits the pool to people most likely to have been deeply immersed in wahhabi propaganda from birth. A course in Qur’anic Arabic can be completed easily online by anyone in a few months.
The most popular translation today, that of Muhsin Khan, is of this third category. It is also by far the strangest as far as I am concerned. It is remarkably easier to find a biography of Khan himself online than any other translator. There are longform articles and youtube lectures about him. These biographies are really more like hagiographies, and all of them emphasise the same few points: his lack of any religious qualification whatsoever, his western education, his assignment to Medina as a doctor by royal decree, and his areligiosity until suddenly having a cryptic dream about the Prophet* which is later interpreted as telling him to become a translator. Not a native speaker of English, Khan was assigned a partner for the project by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, a Moroccan salafi named Taqi ul-Dil al Hilali, who is barely mentioned in these hagiographies, possibly because much of his religious qualifications were received in Nazi Germany, where he studied through the 1930s, only leaving towards the end of WWII. Another bizarre detail here is that it’s conspicuously difficult to find a date of completion or publication of this translation, which was done in 1985. It’s not listed in the book itself. Yasir Qadhi, who has served as Dean of Academic Affairs at the Al-Maghrib Institute for the past 20 years, goes so far as to claim, wildly incorrectly, that the Khan-Hilali translation of the Qur’an was the first ever in English! So that’s where we’re at for epistemology!
What this tells me is that there is a concentrated effort to manufacture consent and hegemony for the “divinely inspired” and “ageless” Hilali-Khan translation. The areligiosity and lack of training of Khan himself is emphasised as though it means that he presented this without bias, while the extensive and aggressively ideological theologcal training of Hilali is downplayed if it is mentioned at all. This is also the translation which the Saudis favour, and of which they print mass quantities of free copies to distribute all over the world. What might be an even bigger deal is that the same Khan-Hilali team is also behind what is unquestionably the authoritative and as far as I know the only complete translation of Bukhari in English. On sunnah.com, that’s what they use, for example. Given the emphasis on hadith in salafi-wahhabi ideology, this is deeply sinister.
While the first phases of orientalist, Victorian, and pre-partition translators had been fairly forthcoming with the interests they were representing and the information they were trying to make available from the Qur’an, as opposed to the things they were emphasising less, the Saudi crown has continued to delberately muddle and obscure these facts in order to present their interpretations as authoritative. The other competing translations have not been able to challenge Saudi hegemony in the mainstream, possibly because of the authority texts carry in Anglophone cultures, which means that conversion in the Anglophone world is a gateway to Wahhabism. The brackets only become satanic when someone comes to believe that they are the words of Allah, not of Khan or Pickthall or whoever. And while that line is difficult to place (which in my view draws a lot of questions about the ethics of “translation” to begin with—these criticisms which were also present in the late 1800s and early 1900s when Muslims of a decadent and obsolete nobility first began to translate it in order to ingratiate themselves to the Britishers) there is little question that in recent times, “translators” and televangelists alike have deliberately fostered this confusion.
vi. Conclusion
This is to my mind a serious threat to the religion, its potential growth, its ability to become the basis of societies and cultures and communities, and even to the relationship between individuals and Allah who come to view God through the eyes of what is effectively a wahhabi clergy, which is both politically reactionary and religiously destructive.
Maybe this is not true in every language on Earth, but in English, given who English-speakers are, we need a strong literary tradition of our own and we cannot suckle the teats of wahhabi reactionaries forever. It is difficult to defend the presence of much available literature in the corpus of a religion that someone would convert to and unashamedly recommend to others. Very little of it can be said to be the result of serious theological wrangling, and less still of it can be said to be grounded in the conditions of the English-speaking world today.
There is a conflict. On one side of it is the people who do not understand epistemology and consider the current corpus somehow not just usable but authoritative and inviolable, who become visibly nervous when its legitimacy is challenged because they believe that what Muhsin Khan and Zakir Naik say is what Islam says (which is shirk, btw). Conflicting with this is the human need to dance playfully with revelation, for it to bend and sway and react to us, to hear us when we cry out to it and call to us when we don’t. The latter is the religion of people who will not buck what we have seen and been shown of the world for the satisfaction of a manufactured “consensus” of “scholars”. This consensus is false. It is the enemy of religion, as far as I am concerned. It is a liquidation of religion and a subordination of religion to the political needs of a decadent bourgeois class and its oil prince collaborators who have betrayed, slaughtered, and oppressed the people.
It do not say this to delegitimise the existing discursive tradition in English. It certainly is a Muslim discursive tradition and deserves respect just for that regardless of its issues. After all, we are not the only Muslims whose discursive traditions have been influenced by now-obsolete ruling classes.
But it should also be said that as it stands, our anglophone Islamic literary corpus is a relic of British imperialism which now nicely serves the Americans. It is absolutely a means of making us anti-materialist colonial subjects in service to one faction or another of the imperialist and collaborator bourgeois class. In aiming to emulate the idealised mythical past of the wahhabis, we discard our own cultural wealths and the ability of Islam to serve as a bridge between, say, the now quite disparate mystic and religious and cultural traditions between the anglophone peoples, whether we are in Europe or Nigeria or India or whever. This is what the spread of Islam has historically accomplished — it has been a bridge between peoples and our cultural wealths and knowledge, not a colonial tool to cut us off from each other and even ourselves. The fact that we don’t have this literature and this tradition as speakers of Farsi or Arabic or the Turkic languages do means we are doing something deeply, deeply wrong. I want to talk to the rest of you without the mediation of a usurous, genocidal oil clergy.
English needs to be an Islamic language, not a language into which Islam is translated, for these changes to take root, and this can come only from a thorough assessment and rejection of our current state of epistemic slavery. We are not the first people to be in a state of epistemic slavery to a reactionary clergy, however, and to be oppressed is no mark of shame for Muslims. It is, however, obligatory to struggle against this. Self-appointed “scholars” who literally go around talking about whose prayers aren’t hashtag valid because they only memorised six minutes of arabic sunnahs while most Muslim countries are facing famine, genocide, war, occupation, etc at any given time have no place here. It’s a sign of immaturity on our part that we have ever allowed such people to have any say or authority at all and in order to become a genuine religious community we need to mature.
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Peace and love on planet earth, and upon all of the prophets, and all of their followers, especially Prophet Lut, AS, whose name has been unforgivably transformed into a vile slur in modern discourse. May Allah forgive everyone the Arabs have come up with a slur for and may the religion of Prophet Lut become something inseparable from the English-speaking peoples and may the English language become a vital instrument of its transmission.
