Lūṭī eschatology

Because liwāṭ was mostly (but not universally) treated as a crime meriting a ḥadd penalty, meaning that it was understood to be a crime prohibited in the text of the Qur’an, conviction required four witnesses or confession, which, naturally, was very difficult for jurists to achieve.Footnote ⁵⁴ Even where the Ḥanafī and Ẓāhirī legal schools called for a taʿzīr (discretionary) punishment,Footnote ⁵⁵ jurists often did not pursue punishment and historical prosecutions were rare across the premodern Muslim world.Footnote ⁵⁶ As Ali, Mohamed Mezziane, and El-Rouayheb note, jurists typically sought to prevent the ‘invasion’ of public space through the revelation of liwāṭ, encouraging the ideal of satr (overlooking or concealing) for sins, applying what Franz Rosenthal describes as the ‘widespread’ ‘social philosophy’ of concealing sin on poor morality or encouraging offenders not to confess, but to repent in silence.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Thomas Bauer notes, the reality was that there were hardly any ‘practical consequences’ to committing liwāṭ on earth.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this world, there was always the radical potential to get away with one’s commitment of liwāṭ.

The eschatological imagination was another matter. As Ash Geissinger has suggested with regard to the ḥadīth tradition broadly, ‘paradise is constructed as a realm that perpetually passes judgment on earthly events’ and eschatological narratives depicting Jannah/Jahannam often serve to construct ‘an “other world” that nonetheless remains intimately tied to this world, and functions as a space in which theological controversies and questions of social order can be negotiated’.Footnote ⁵⁹ God is imagined consistently across the Qur’an and the ḥadīth tradition as all-seeing and all-knowing, and lūṭīs cannot evade Him, nor will they receive any recompense from Him.Footnote ⁶⁰

This, the conflict between worldly possibility and eschatological terror, is the central motif in a poem that is cited anonymously by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah as the conclusion to his discussion of liwāṭ as one of the greatest of crimes in al-Dāʾ wa-l-dawāʾ (The Illness and the Cure).Footnote ⁶¹ In this poem, the poet, who we might assume is Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah himself,Footnote ⁶² draws out and imagines the lūṭī as a moral agent in his contemporary society:Footnote ⁶³

Here, we see the poet supposedly deliver to his lūṭī interlocutor, this ‘fucker of men’, the bushrā (good news) of Hell, reformulated as the Red Heaven, inverting the term Jannah to describe Jahannam. Across the poem, earthly pleasures are transformed into an image of eschatological pain, a transformation that is captured in the poet’s sarcastic deployment of such positive terminology for the horror that awaits them.

The most striking iteration of this can be seen in the sexual couple itself. ‘Just as the two of them shared in a sinful pleasure’, the sexual partnership will become a sight of torture as ‘each of them will be tortured by his partner’ and the ‘downcast’ will ‘be distressed by him’ in the afterlife. The only clear indication the poem gives of how the sexual partner will turn into a torturer is in the fifth line. Here, the poet suggests that the lūṭī will desperately wish for their partner’s absence, but such hopes will be quashed; we might presume that, in a sense, the mere presence of the partner is a haunting reminder in the afterlife of the sinfulness of one’s choice, one’s earthly mistakes that have now become confirmed as mistakes through the reality of one’s afterlife punishment.

Beyond their mere presence within the private space of the couple, the poet’s use of the term jahr^an, which I have translated here as ‘clear as day’, contains within it a latent depiction of how he conceives of the lūṭī’s ability to torture their partner. We might also translate this line as ‘you will see him out in the open’—as, more to the point, will everybody else. Indeed, just as the poet imagines earthly pleasure transforming into eschatological pain, the movement from this world to the afterlife is accompanied by a process of revelation. The relationship, previously known to the couple alone, is now made visible for all to see.

Shame, and the shame that accompanies revelation, is not an unusual motif in the Islamic eschatological imagination. In an unreliable but widely cited ḥadīth, for example, Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 687), is alleged to have said that, ‘Whoever leaves the earth in a certain state, will arise from the grave [in the afterlife] in that state, to such a point that the lūṭī will leave the grave with his penis attached to the anus of his mate, both of them exposed for all of creation to see (muftaḍiḥīn ʿalā ruʾūs al-khalāʾiq)Footnote ⁶⁵ on the Day of Judgement.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Here, the sinners’ sexual identification as a lūṭī is literally revealed on their bodies when they are risen from the grave in a state of permanent sexual intercourse, itself a further instantiation of the transformation of pleasure into a matching kind of pain.

The topsy-turvy logic that characterises the poet’s depiction of the transformations that take place in the movement from this world to the next are brought to a head in his sarcastic invitation to the lūṭī to engage in all manner of immoral and illegal actions, encapsulated in the first hemistich of the second line, ‘eat, drink, fornicate, bugger, and be merry’. Of course, in a way, the lūṭī might as well maximise on the pleasures he can enjoy for now, for he certainly will not in the afterlife.

The choice of food and drink as analogous acts to liwāṭ and zināʾ is not accidental. Underlying the moral connection between food/drink and sex is the problem of corporeal desire and the concupiscible faculty, which gets to the root of human existence on earth and the ontology of the soul.Footnote ⁶⁷ In Rawḍat al-muḥibbīn, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, like many medieval authors, outlined a tripartite vision of the soul.Footnote ⁶⁸ The first part was the nafs samāwiyyah ʿuluwiyyah (Heavenly soul), whose love (maḥabbah) is directed at the good (maʿārif; plural of maʿrūf, as in al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf, enjoining the good), as well as the acquisition of virtues (iktisāb al-faḍāʾil) and the pushing away of base things (ijtināb al-radhāʾil). Then, the nafs sabuʿiyyah ghaḍabiyyah (predatory, angry soul) whose love is directed at conquest and leadership. Finally, the nafs ḥaywāniyyah shahwāniyyah (animalistic, desiring soul) whose love is directed at foods, drinks, and sexual intercourse. This third soul is primarily responsible for the human’s experience of desire (shahwah) alongside its analogue hawā (passion). Shahwah was broadly understood by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah and similar thinkers as a useful human faculty, in that one needs it to stay alive, as one would not seek out food and drink without desire.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, in excess (al-mufriṭ minhu), it becomes problematic, because it leads the individual to continue accumulating or consuming beyond their needs. Controlling one’s appetitive desire was central to the theoretical control of the body’s urges; when one cannot engage in licit intercourse, for example, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah recommends fasting, which yaksir shahawāt al-nafs (breaks the desires of the soul) and works like wijāʾ (castration).Footnote ⁷⁰ Not eating becomes a salve for not fornicating, curbing the appetite in the same way.

In this line in the poem, the poet brings food and drink together with liwāṭ and zināʾ as natural counterparts. We might read this alignment between types of appetitive consumer in two ways. On the one hand, we might say that because liwāṭ is so sinful, such a stark rebellion against God’s commands, the lūṭī must surely be getting up to other troubling practices, like gorging himself on the earthly delights of food and drink. Elsewhere in his argument, for example, he describes liwāṭ by saying that it yufīd annahu jāmiʿ li-maʿānī ism al-fāḥishah (conveys collectively all the meanings built into the word obscenity),Footnote ⁷¹ identifying it as so sinful that the lūṭī is framed as a kind of total sinner. Liwāṭ becomes a sin which naturally stretches beyond this act alone and comes to stand in for all manner of sins.

On the other, this line also bespeaks the lūṭī’s imagined capacity for appetitive control, itself framed across the Islamic tradition as central to the construction of masculinity; as Zahra Ayubi has argued with regards to the Persian ethics tradition, nāmardī (unmanliness) derives from the improper control of one’s sexual appetites—both in the terms of too much restriction and in the terms of too little.Footnote ⁷² If masculinity was founded on emotional and rational control of the body, then engaging in sexual sin and following one’s desires unto transgression of the law implied a total lack of rational control, undermining the patriarchal claim to order, an argument made previously in Mezziane’s study of juridical responses to liwāṭ.Footnote ⁷³ Here, the poet’s implication that the lūṭī is getting up to all of this appetitive consumption depicts him as totally unable to control his desires: the lūṭī is not just an isolated sinner but a man who is engulfed in appetitive consumption and sexual sin of all kinds. He becomes a threatening spectre, a man whose appetite is unbound even when faced with seemingly grave divine and eschatological threats.

Hedonism, then, is central to how the poem imagines the lūṭī as a figure. This is brought to a conclusion, along with the other threads outlined in the above analysis, in the poet’s description of the lūṭī ‘hurrying along’ to that Red Heaven, seemingly without taking the time to think or reflect on his actions. He eats, drinks, fucks, buggers, and all the while is ‘merry’ about it, all the while his actions will lead him directly to that Red Heaven and the kind of painful eschatological torment realised through his sexual partner. Where desire generally leads the individual to commit sins ʿājilan (at haste) and without conception of earthly or eschatological consequences in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s view of human passion,Footnote ⁷⁴ here the lūṭī specifically incarnates this vision of the man whose passions are unbounded, a man whose actions fly in the face of God’s promise and threat, a total sinner whose ‘good news’ contains nothing but horror.

Lūṭī genealogy and Arab-Islamic discourses of descent

The poet is not the only bearer of a message to the ‘fucker of men’. Rather, the Qur’anic People of Lūṭ become a further eschatological interlocutor. In the poem’s third line, the poet describes the People of Lūṭ as ‘your brothers’ (ikhwānukum), whilst the People of Lūṭ declare ‘we are your forefathers’ (naḥnu aslāf^un lakum) in their message to the ‘fuckers of men’ in the contemporary world. In this grim eschatological vision, the People of Lūṭ are seen ‘waiting for’ their descendants before they will all taste punishment together. In his broader conversation with the ‘fuckers of men’, the poet invokes the People of Lūṭ as a warning to their addressee: if they should carry on in their actions without a care for their future fate, these dreaded people will be their Hellmates forever. More than that, the poet is reminding them that these are their brothers and forefathers, the people whose example they are following. Indeed, in introducing the poem, the poet notes that laqad qarraba Allāh subḥānuhu masāfat al-ʿadhāb bayna hādhihi al-ummah wa-bayna ikhwānihim fī al-ʿamal (verily, God made the distance between the punishment of this community and their brothers in the act short);Footnote ⁷⁵ they may be separated in the here-and-now, but in Hell they will be reunited forever with their ‘brothers in the act’ in their punishment.

This is not the only time he uses the terms ikhwān and salaf/aslāf to frame the transhistorical relationship between the lūṭī and the People of Lūṭ. In his chapter on the censure of passionate love (dhamm al-ʿishq) in Rawḍat al-muḥibbīn wa-nuzhat al-mushtāqīn, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah provides an extensive discussion of the story of the People of Lūṭ and their wayward desires, in which he repeatedly frames the relationship between these two sets of actors in such terms. He begins this section by outlining his imagination of the community and his reading of the People of Lūṭ:Footnote ⁷⁶

He then briefly runs through his reading of the Qur’anic story, before returning to his comparative discussion of the People of Lūṭ and the contemporary community some paragraphs later:Footnote ⁸⁰

Across his description of the story of Lūṭ’s ministry to the inhabitants of the cities, we see the author repeatedly remind his contemporary reader that this story reaches into the present by referring to these ‘lūṭī brothers among the ancients and the moderns’. This relationship is configured through the use of a genealogical and familial language that frames those who commit this act as brothers across time, with the recent lūṭī following the example of their primordial forefathers.

Neither the term brother(s) nor ‘generation’ (salaf/aslāf) are rhetorically idle for the Muslim reader, In the Qur’an’s discursive construction of communal ethics for the emergent community of Believers (muʾminūn), the term ‘brotherhood’ became integral to imagining how that community would cohere. In al-Ḥujurāt/49:10, God describes the believers as a brotherhood (ikhwatun). This is part of the text’s broader reconstitution of the early community of Believers along an ‘ultimately idealistic’ egalitarian sense of brotherhood that marks a sharp break from the Qur’an’s vision of the fragmented and unequal pre-Islamic Arab society, in which the Arabs were divided into peoples, tribes and families vying against each other.Footnote ⁸³

The term salaf used in both of these sections and the poem is even more striking for what it entails about the relationship between the People of Lūṭ and the lūṭī. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah here argues that the People of Lūṭ form a salaf; in punishment, God transformed them into an example for those who commit the same crime in the modern day. This is somewhat concordant with the inverse use of the term salaf to describe the ‘pious predecessors’ or Salaf Ṣāliḥ, the first three generations of Muslims, who, in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s revivalist ethics at least, are configured as a source of ethical and behavioural guidance for later Muslims, as examples to be followed.

Through this parodic and subversive repurposing of the language of Islamic community building, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah literally frames the People of Lūṭ’s relationship to the medieval lūṭī as running parallel to his framework for understanding Muslim self-identity and communal belonging. The lūṭīs across time become an ummah lūṭiyyah, in his words, a rival community to the Muslims.Footnote ⁸⁴ Taken to its conclusion, the lūṭī community is constructed here through a parodic perversion of the idioms of Islamic community, turning them into a rival brotherhood who follow the model of a rival salaf.

This interplay between quasi-Islamic and genealogical communal terminology is not just a facet of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s writing. Both al-Nuwayrī (d. 1333) and Ibn Manẓūr (d. 1312), two slightly older writers who were far less severe in their pietistic and moralistic writings, cite stories in which men in the contemporary world go to the Dead Sea, whereupon they look at the sea or at the (supposed) ruins of the cities and cry out,Footnote ⁸⁵ hādhihi birkat/madāʾin aṣḥābinā (this is the lake/these are the cities of our companions), before being roundly punished by God, swallowed by a wave or the ground.Footnote ⁸⁶ Much as was the case for the term salaf, the term aṣḥāb makes the reader think of the Ṣaḥābah (Companions) of the Prophet, further underscoring the parodic repurposing of Islamic language to describe means of constructing communal identity here.

More strikingly, and seen from the opposite vantage point to the poem’s ventriloquisation of the People of Lūṭ, these anecdotes explore how the medieval lūṭī might have understood his relationship to these Qur’anic forebears. In his melancholic acknowledgement of being ‘companions’ over the ruins of their cities, he makes an essentially heretical declaration, allying himself to these People in the face of God’s punishment of them, a punishment made literal in the landscape itself.

The heretical nature of their statement is brought to the fore in al-Nuwayrī’s conclusion: la yabʿud an yuʿāqib man tajhara bi-maʿāṣī Allāh wa-intasaba li-man kafara bi-llāh … bi-mā ʿāqabahum (it is not unlikely that, after someone confesses to disobeying God and traces his descent from those who denied God … that He would punish them [the contemporary sinner] with what he punished them [the People of Lūṭ])—made starkly apparent in their deaths.

The language al-Nuwayrī uses here, the choice of the term intasaba (to trace one’s genealogy to a forefather), is revealing about how he understands the medieval lūṭī’s declaration of shared community. The verb, derived from the base root nūn-sīn-bāʾ, connects the anecdote to the science of genealogy (ʿilm al-nasab or ʿilm al-ansāb), an exceedingly important body of medieval Arabic knowledge.Footnote ⁸⁷ Much as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah parodies an Islamic idiom of descent through the medieval Muslim’s/lūṭī’s relationship to the Salaf/salaf, al-Nuwayrī here reaches for genealogical science as the means through which to understand how the lūṭī sees his relationship to his Qur’anic forebears, in this case framing it as a kind of wilful adoption of lineage, a moment in which the lūṭī declares his descent from this community of disbelievers, perhaps over and above their actual forefathers.

Across these texts, we see a reimagining of the communal foundations of the transhistorical relationship between the lūṭī and the Qur’anic People of Lūṭ. At once familial in its language, these early fourteenth century authors play with the logics through which human community is constructed, with Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah taking an explicitly Islamic approach in his construction of lūṭī genealogy and al-Nuwayrī drawing on the adab science of genealogy. Both authors thereby parody ways through which the contemporary individual might have understood their place in the world, either through an Islamic logic of brotherhood and descent from the pious exemplars of the Salaf, or through a quasi-ethnic imagination of the bond between ancestor and descendant. In both accounts, the People of Lūṭ are framed as the ultimate source, from whom the modern lūṭī’s descent and sense of community are traced.

Lūṭī genealogy and the poetic imagination

Capping off his retelling of the Lūṭ story in the chapter on the censure of passionate love (ʿishq) in Rawḍat al-muḥibbīn, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah cites another anonymous poem that is also likely his own work:Footnote ⁸⁸

This poem shares many of the same themes as the first poem. Most obviously, the poet plays with questions of moral responsibility and accountability, leveraging the eschatological future as a stark warning to the lūṭī. Here, as is unsurprising given the chapter’s focus, ʿishq is the cause of moral depravity: the lūṭī ‘fucked men out of our love for them’ even though ‘that love led to the worst of all places’. Desire is central to the poet’s conception of liwāṭ, that the lūṭī follows his desires in spite of the eschatological warning (‘Did your God not come with a threat?’) that he had received; this echoes and amplifies the first poem’s depiction of the lūṭī as the careless sinner, as the sinner who has lost control of his appetitive desires and acts on them without regard for his eschatological forever. Likewise, earthly sensuality balances eschatological pain; as the People of Lūṭ say in their final argument, both they and the modern lūṭī will suffer the ‘punishment of disgrace/just as we all tasted the pleasure of intercourse with them’.

Whereas the first poem had leveraged the People of Lūṭ as a threatening spectre of the eschatological future, ventriloquising them as relaying the good news of the sexual community’s total reunion in the Hellfire, here the two communities are pitted against each other in conversation, allowing the poet to explore and imagine both halves of the community’s self-conception and understanding of this relationship.

At the beginning of the poem, it appears that the two communities are definitively different from each other (they ‘may not be the People of Lūṭ exactly’), even if there is a similarity between them (‘not far off from them’). We might read this through an anthropological lens: the post-Qur’anic lūṭī is not technically one of the People of Lūṭ in a tribal or communal sense, in that he is not ‘exactly’ one of those people to whom Lūṭ was sent and did not live in the cities wherein the ‘deed’ was practised. However, through their shared action, they are ‘not far off from them’, actively taking on characteristics that make the contemporary community resemble the Qur’anic community.

Emotionally, the poem also separates the two groups. There is no warmth to their relationship. The Qur’anic People are not happy to see those who followed their example, but are instead portrayed as unimpressed them, as exemplified in the poet’s emphasis on the lack of greeting given to the newcomers. In their initial exchange, the Qur’anic People reference the threat that God came with, referring both to their own destruction as an exemplary warning of what might come to anybody following in their footsteps and to the articulation of that warning in the Qur’an.

The post-Qur’anic lūṭīs retort that they were merely following a path laid out by their Qur’anic forebears (‘but you had/paved an unpraiseworthy road in passionate love’); this underscores the aforementioned imagination of the People of Lūṭ as a salaf in the prior poem. In this rebuttal, they claim that because the Qur’anic People had already paved the path, they were ‘more deserving’ (aḥaqq) of punishment, and that they, the post-Qur’anic lūṭīs, were merely ‘led astray’ (ghayr rashīd) by the example they were following, as if victims of their imitation.

In this response, they also parody an explicitly Islamic language of community, mimesis and belonging. Describing themselves as ghayr rashīd etymologically harkens back to the Rightly-Guided (Rāshidūn) Caliphs, the first four Islamic caliphs before the establishment of the Umayyad empire. Here again, the poet draws on a fundamentalist ethic; the lūṭīs are not rightly-guided, unlike those early rulers. More obviously, they argue their forebears sanantum ṣirāṭan lanā (paved a way for us). This first term, sanantum, is derived from the same root (sīn-nūn-nūn) that calls to mind the Sunnah of the Prophet. Thinking mimetically again, the Sunnah stands as the primary exemplary model for Muslims; much as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah draws on the Salaf across his work on liwāṭ, there is a subtle comparison made here too between the Sunnah of the People of Lūṭ and the Sunnah of the Prophet, from which the modern lūṭī has gone astray. As for the term ṣirāṭ, the poet borrows directly from the Qur’anic image of the Straight Road (al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm); as Nicolai Sinai notes, the Qur’an itself frames the ṣirāṭ as God’s alone, ‘distinguished from other paths [sabīl, pl. subul] by its conspicuousness and straightness.’Footnote ⁹⁴ That the People of Lūṭ have fashioned an ‘unpraiseworthy ṣirāṭ in love/immorality’ sets up their way in direct conflict with God’s Straight Road, further articulating sexual community through a parodic repurposing of Islamic language.

The Qur’anic People rebut their accusations by returning to the question of knowledge and choice. Breezing over the idea that the post-scriptural lūṭīs were merely following them, the Qur’anic People remind the post-scriptural lūṭīs that ‘your Prophets warned you/of what happened to us’. The plural is instructive: this is a message given by Lūṭ, exemplified in their destruction, and rearticulated by Muḥammad. That warning and threat, as the post-scriptural lūṭīs may now realise, was ‘truthful indeed’, both the earthly punishment of the People of Lūṭ and the promise of eschatological punishment for sin and disbelief. Despite the warnings, however, they did not believe and instead blindly followed the People of Lūṭ and their own desires, meaning that ‘you are no better than us’, and therefore should not receive a lesser punishment than the Qur’anic People.

This entire exchange is intertextually patterned off the Qur’anic imagination of the disbelievers in Hell in al-Aʿrāf/7:38–39. Here, God describes the procession of each community (ummah) into Jahannam, saying that each community will curse the previous one, claiming that they were misled (aḍallūnā) by others, wa-qālat ūlāhum li-ukhrāhum fa-mā kāna lakumu ʿalaynā min faḍlin fa-dhūqū al-ʿadhāb bi-mā kuntum taksibūna (and the first of them said to the last, ‘You were no better than us, so taste the punishment you earned!’). In its Qur’anic context, this is generic, referring to all those who enter Jahannam and imagining an historical vision of human sin separated by chronological determinacy. The poet has reformulated this verse in the eighth line into the specific inter-lūṭī discussion, denying these contemporary ukhrā (the last) the ability to claim they were merely following an example.

By the poem’s conclusion, however, any sense of chaos and blame, whereby the two groups attempt to differentiate themselves from each other, has melted away. Despite the groups’ squabbling, the idea that the two communities will be united in the fire (i.e. Jahannam) underlies the entire poem, much as it did the first poem. In the fourth line of that poem, the People of Lūṭ also characterise themselves as ‘waiting for’ their ‘brothers’, much as in this poem the People of Lūṭ find themselves waiting in the watering hole of pus and ichor for the post-Qur’anic lūṭīs, so that all can be punished together. As the Qur’anic People conclude, in many ways the differences and different valences of action/motivation/knowledge held by each group are irrelevant in the face of God, Jahannam and the overwhelming spectre of punishment which haunts all of these authors’ imaginations of liwāṭ: in the end, what does the chronology of their sin matter, considering that ‘our gathering in the fire is not far off’?

Looking beyond the poetry, this motif aligns with ideas that can also be found in the ḥadīth tradition. In one ḥadīth, for example, Anas ibn Mālik (d. 709) tells us that the Prophet had said, man māta min ummati yaʿmal ʿamal qawm Lūṭ naqalahu allāh ilayhim ḥattā ḥushira maʿahum (whoever from my community dies undertaking the deed of the People of Lot, God will move him to where they [the People of Lot] are [i.e. where they are placed in the cosmic order after the Day of Judgement], and he will be gathered up together with them).Footnote ⁹⁵ Here, Jahannam (Hell) is imagined spatially with groups of people punished together according to their sin.Footnote ⁹⁶ The lūṭī will be physically moved in the hereafter to be adjoined to the People of Lūṭ. At this point, they will be gathered up together and suffer their communal punishment, separated from the rest of humanity, regardless of whatever other identitarian commitments he may have.

The poet’s method across this poem, dividing the People of Lūṭ and the lūṭī into discrete but ‘not far’ groups from each other is instructive for how he understands them. Where at the beginning we sense the separation, and indeed the tension between them, by the end of the poem, that separation has fallen away: time, geography, tribe, history, all of these differences are as naught when faced with eschatological fate and the identificatory power of God. In human terms, the poet effectively concludes, these people might be different. Yet, when it comes to how God sees them, He will wait to punish them altogether in the Fire, regardless of time or place in which the action was committed. Patterned off the Qur’anic view of sin generally, this poetic imagination of lūṭī genealogy disabuses the reader of the idea that any one of them is more or less to blame depending on whether they originated or imitated the sin: both are sinners and both will face their just punishment.

Lest the warning become true … in you

If there is one Qur’anic verse that is central to both Ibn Kathīr’s and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s view of the lūṭī as a figure, it is Hūd/11:83, mā hiya min al-ẓālimīna bi-baʿīd (they are/it is not far from the wrongdoers). The first line of the previously cited poem is itself a loose iqtibās or borrowing from the line; mā hiya min al-ẓālimīna bi-baʿīdin becomes mā qawmu Lūṭin minkum bi-baʿīdin. We have also already seen Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah quote this verse with some delight, arguing that with it God khawwafa ikhwānahum ʿalā lisān rasūlihi (struck fear into their brothers, i.e. the medieval lūṭīs, through the tongue of His messenger). In other words, through Muḥammad’s revelation of this verse, God brought the verse to bear upon those ‘brothers’ of the People of Lūṭ in the post-Qur’anic world.

This verse comes at the end of the Lūṭ story as it is reiterated in Sūrat Hūd, just after the punishment of the People of Lūṭ. It has a seemingly threatening undertone to it, although the vague use of the pronoun hiya (she/it) rather than the specification of what exactly is not far from the disbelievers leaves the exact nature of that threat theoretically open-ended.

Early exegetes of the verse had a relatively unrestricted view of its present-day implications. Al-Ṭabarī (d. 932), for example, includes three major readings.Footnote ⁹⁷ Mujāhid ibn Jabr (d. 722), the prominent early scholar and Follower (tābiʿ), is recorded as saying both that those who do wrong would be struck with what the People of Lūṭ were struck and that with this verse He terrorised (yurhib bihā) the Quraysh; earlier, al-Ṭabarī had suggested that God was saying that the mushrikī qawmika yā Muḥammad (disbelievers of your tribe, O Muḥammad) were the intended referent.Footnote ⁹⁸ Here, the key term ẓālimūn can be interpreted in an open-ended way as anybody who does wrong but could be understood to apply to specific wrongdoers, namely the Quraysh, anchoring the verse into its revelatory context. The final (variously worded) reading attested by some interpreters suggests that God did not grant support (mā ajāra) to anyone who did wrong after the People of Lūṭ’s destruction.

Ibn Kathīr characteristically eschews these earlier readings in favour of a narrower reading that he aligns to a fundamentalist reading of the ḥadīth tradition:Footnote ⁹⁹

In Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, he likewise argues that the verse should be interpreted as mā hādhihi al-ʿuqūbah bi-baʿīdah mimman ashbahahum fī fiʿlihim (this punishment is not far from those who resemble them in their action), before turning to a similar discussion of juridical punishment and quoting this exact ḥadīth.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Where earlier exegetes had tended towards a broad interpretation of the verse, Ibn Kathīr instead reads this verse as speaking specifically and narrowly to those in the contemporary world who resemble them in their wrongdoing, namely the medieval lūṭī. This specific resemblance in the act mirrors Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s description of the People of Lūṭ as ikhwānuhum fī al-ʿamal (brothers in the act) with which he introduced the first poem in al-Dāʾ wa-l-dawāʾ, also citing in this same paragraph Hūd/11:83.

Whereas we have seen Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah frame his account of the relationship between the People of Lūṭ and the lūṭī through his imagination of their eschatological meeting, it is in Ibn Kathīr’s imagination and reflection upon the Qur’anic references to the physical remnants of God’s punishment that we see him explore the same problem. In al-Dhāriyāt/51:37, God mentioned that he left an ayah (sign) for those who fear a painful torment; likewise, in al-Ṣaffāt/37:137, the ruins lying on a route that the Meccans pass by muṣbiḥīna/wa-bi-l-layli (in the morning/and at night). Ibn Kathīr suggests that the Dead Sea, this rotting and stinking body of water that does not permit anything to grow by it, was left as an ʿibrah wa-muthlah wa-ʿiẓah wa-ayah ʿalā qudrat Allāh (a lesson, example, warning, and sign of the power of God), most specifically to take revenge (intiqām) upon those who deny his orders and follow their passions.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Following this brief discussion, he argues:Footnote ¹⁰²

Here again, he returns to the question of resemblance: if someone ‘resemble[s] a group, then he is one of them’ (man tashabbaha bi-qawm fa-huwa minhum). Whereas Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s poem, the first line of which he goes on to quote, maintains a distinct earthly separation between these two groups, a separation which essentially melts away in the afterlife, Ibn Kathīr essentially collapses the barrier between them—and the lūṭī becomes one of the People of Lūṭ by resembling them in this act.

This reading of lūṭī communal identity, genealogy, and sexual history is then undergirded by his narrow literalist reading of Hūd/11:83, the verse with which he ends his retelling of the Lūṭ story in both his Prophetic history, Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, and his universal history, al-Bidāyah wa-l-nihāyah. He links this verse not only to the lūṭī in abstract but articulates it in dynamic relationship with his reader through his bifurcation of the world into two groups.

On the one hand, he describes the ‘reasonable man’ as the man who constrains his sexual impulses only to his licit wives and concubines and who ‘pelts every desiring demon’ for fear of becoming like the People of Lūṭ, for fear that the ‘warning become true in him and he become one of those’ described in Hūd/11:83, namely those who ‘resemble’ the People of Lūṭ, those who are near to punishment. On the other hand, we have the lūṭī, the man who has not feared God, not curbed his sexual appetites, and has thereby become one of those people mentioned by God in that final verse. Any man in his account is liable to become a lūṭī.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Should the ‘reasonable’ man fail to ‘pelt every desiring demon’, and should he leave asunder that which God created for him (namely, licit heterosexual sex with a wife or enslaved woman), he might be tempted to engage in male–male anal intercourse, assuming as Ibn Kathīr seems to that this desire is present in all men, and thereby become like the People of Lūṭ, a lūṭī.

The reader is left with a dire warning: there is a constant requirement to control one’s desires to avoid becoming like the People of Lūṭ in one’s sexual acts, lest the ‘warning becomes true in him’. In other words, the reader must ensure to control his desires at all times through the exercise of his faculty of reason (ʿaql), which alone can control shahwah, echoing the approach of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (and Ibn al-Jawzī) to the problem of love and desire that we saw encapsulated in the first poem’s ideation of the lūṭī as a sinner given in to his craven appetites and corporeal desires.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The rhetorical construction of a communal identity that stretches across time and links the medieval lūṭī with the primordial People of Lūṭ is not a surprising move on the part of these moralists. In creating this transhistorical community of sexual sinners through a parodic repurposing of the language through which they imagine their own revivalist sense of Islamic communal belonging, the medieval lūṭī is thereby excised from the Islamic ecumene, shorn off into his own heretical sexual grouping. In the construction of a separate community, the boundaries of the non-lūṭī community are seemingly solidified against the spectre of this sexual miscreant, this heretic. Yet, in doing so, the author is essentially building a textual ‘we’ (namely, his interaction with his reader) that is centred on the ambivalence of belonging. If anybody can become a lūṭī through one false move, through one moment of inattention, then one is always liable to give in to that desire—and thereby become like them. In other words, there remains always the threat of becoming-a-lūṭī buried within the reader’s (and the author’s) consciousness, a threat that must be managed.

This moral warning with which Ibn Kathīr ends both of his accounts of the Lūṭ story is not idle, nor is it neutral as a reading experience. His retelling of the Lūṭ story is necessarily articulated towards the ‘reasonable man’ who ‘fears becoming one of them’; it serves as a reminder of the necessity of moral stricture and control. In the foregoing analysis, I too have assumed that the reader is the ‘reasonable man’. What of the unreasonable reader, or the reader who has not controlled his desires? Someone who has already engaged in liwāṭ—and thereby become a lūṭī—will naturally have a different reception of this text (or of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s poems) and this warning. He may feel dread and a desire to repent, given Ibn Kathīr’s reminder of God’s eschatological warnings, or he may feel altogether differently; for now, we simply do not have the source base to make any claim on how lūṭī readers engaged with material such as this.

However, desire and readerly human consciousness is not as simple as Ibn Kathīr makes out. Given that one can only become a lūṭī when one engages in liwāṭ, becoming a lūṭī is provided with a definite chronology, a before and an after. What, then, can we make of the lūṭī before he becomes a lūṭī? Of course, our authors would say he only becomes a lūṭī because he did not sufficiently ‘pelt every desiring demon’, becoming an irrational actor, a total sinner, to hark back to Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s view of liwāṭ. But, moving away from the assumption inherent in this argument that the lūṭī must have lost his mind to become so, we have a man who has chosen to follow his passions over God’s threat, over the moral lecture of the authors. Can we theorise that choice or this figure?

In trans studies, the figure of the egg has come symbolically to represent the pre-transition relationship to transition.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Once ‘hatched’, the latency of identity inside the egg transforms into the newly-forged self; as Grace Lavery has it, the egg ‘is displaced in time, ‘retconned’ back into one’s own being; a protocol for a new, and newly incommensurable, sense-making procedure’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In other words, one cannot proclaim to be an egg, even if eggs exist by virtue of their hatching, because to claim oneself as an egg is to out oneself as trans, to hatch, what Lavery describes as ‘a liar’s paradox’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For Lavery, egg theory lays out a paradoxical twin claim that transition is both impossible and inevitable.Footnote ¹¹⁰ So, too, for Ibn Kathīr is becoming a lūṭī.

One cannot call oneself a lūṭī before one engages in the act. However, to engage in the act implies for this author an auto-identificatory desire to become one of the People of Lūṭ, a desire that feels impossible given the weight of legal and scriptural prohibition that the author sees in God’s treatment of them. In many ways, the psychospectral threat of the egg (and the threat of the lūṭī) becomes so problematic because of the ways in which such a stark transformation, a crossing of a seemingly solid—but actually porous—boundary, calls all identities and labels into question: If somebody else can hatch, can become a lūṭī, what is to prevent me from doing so?

We might think of the man who is not yet a lūṭī as an egg-lūṭī. Much like a trans person’s conflicted experience of the desire to transition, the egg-lūṭī’s desire to become a lūṭī, for such is necessarily the analogic consequence of acting upon his desire to commit liwāṭ, is likewise battered by all sorts of forces, including the kinds of eschatological fear that both authors invoke across their discussions. We might be tempted to ask: Under what circumstances does the egg-lūṭī hatch? When does the reasonable man give in to his seemingly normal(ised) desire to engage in sex beyond what is legally permissible?

To do so is to gamble that God’s threat is not real, as has the unrepentant lūṭī in both our authors’ depictions of him as careless and inattentive to his eschatological forever. However, not to do so is to live in the fulcrum of his unfulfilled desire, to strive and struggle against a sincere desire to commit an action one understands to be illicit and, in at least these thinkers’ view, heretical. At the moment of engaging in the action, the becoming-lūṭī turns his back on the eschatological threat seemingly proven in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s or Ibn Kathīr’s marshalling of the legal and theological evidence, a threat that he had previously prioritised in ‘pelt[ing] every desiring demon’. Without even thinking about the intersection of such sexual desire with the possibility of love, an intersection that overly complicates where our theory of medieval sexuality can so far take us, the egg-lūṭī necessarily battles between the experience of containing his desire, the potential for that desire to become uncontained, and his religiously motivated fear in the expectation of eschatological torment and divine rejection should he engage in it.

It is hard to theorise the potential for this kind of ambivalence either in medieval desire or as a reading experience from the sources we have; what do we do with people who struggled with the desire not to engage in liwāṭ and ultimately did not, even if they wanted to? Or with the lūṭī’s desires before they were acted upon? In the same contingent sense that those who remain questioning and ultimately never act on latent urges or ‘come out of the closet’ have a complex relationship to labels like gay or queer, the egg-lūṭī remains by his very nature not a lūṭī—until he becomes one, that is. Yet, he must have existed—otherwise there would be no lūṭī—even if locating and theorising his subjectivity is not possible within the current terms of historical research.

As a more theoretical point, if we only explore historical sexuality through the lens of the sexual actor (i.e. the lūṭī), we lose any real attempt to theorise the experience of medieval sexuality, its manifestation in human consciousness as it is shaped through interaction with the world around it and the human capacity to choose. The lūṭī emerges into historical consciousness fully formed, through the brute force of a taxonomical approach to naming and describing him. Yet lost to us is this egg-lūṭī, this man whose fears and desires cannot be skirted around but whose struggle with his emotions means he does not fit neatly in either taxonomical or historical camp.

For Ibn Kathīr and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, however, it is this man that their moral construction of a transhistorical lūṭī community really targets, in a way. Neither author is talking about the threat of liwāṭ and the horror of the lūṭī to an audience that has nothing to do with either; their primary purpose is moral education and stricture, to ensure that those who read the text do not lose sight of the importance of the moral control of their desires. In leveraging the weight of legal and scriptural evidence, and in focalising that evidence through the construction of a sexual community linking the lūṭī to the dreaded People of Lūṭ, whose historical punishment is a clear proof for both authors of God’s willingness and capacity for direct intiqām (vengeance) upon those who disobey him, both authors remind this egg-lūṭī, this everyman, that should he follow his desires this is the kind of person he will become. Following one’s desires is not without consequence, for the reader too will become one of the People of Lūṭ if his control of his desire should slip. If the reader does waiver and become unreasonable, is this really the kind of person, the kind of community, he wants to become?