countjulian

Hey, I just wrote an article about Alexander the Great as he is in the Quran called "Dhu'l-Qarneyn, Alexander Romances, and Quranic Nonsense." What do you think?

Eirene, adelphoi.

According to the Quran, Surat Al-Kahf verses 86-99, Dhu'l-Qarneyn ("the two horned lord") is presented as a pious Muslim and a prophet, who follows a path that Allah shows him to a small mud spring where he finds the sun set into (!). The earliest sira tradition (Ibn Ishaq) identifies mister Two Horns as none other than Alexander son of Phillip of Macedon, AKA Alexander the Great. The appellation "two horned lord" stems from a number of sources. In the Biblical book of Daniel, the forger apocryphally refers to "a great ram" who will arise out of Greece, and will but up against a great empire with his two horns, and will create a new empire. This figure is Alexander. Daniel, although supposedly written circa 6th BC, was actually written closer to 164 BC. At this time, association of Alexander with the ram was long-standing. Alexander was convinced during his lifetime that he was the son of/ was the Egyptian/Greek god Ammon-Zeus, who was commonly portrayed with a rams head. After he died, it became a very famous association. Prefiguring the myths influence on Quranic lore, Arabian kings even minted coins of ram-headed Alexander (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Abiel_coin.jpg).

And now we come to Dhu'l-Qarneyn in the Quran. The Quranic account portrays Alexander as a pious Muslim, who follows the path of Allah to find the place the sun sets in (a muddy spring!), gives praise to Allah, and builds a gate to hold back the other-worldly nations of Gog and Magog, from the Biblical book of Revelations (a gate holding back hordes from outside the world? but how could they walk here? did the author(s) of the Quran think the world is flat?).

The historical problems here are problematic to say the least. We have a number of very reliable sources on Muhammad, as well as the before-mentioned archaeological evidence. None of it ever mentions Alexander worshipping one God called Allah. The closest he came was a single sacrifice in the Jewish temple, but he never looked into Judaism, and he sacrificed at all the temples he came across. As already stated, he believed himself to be both god and the son of god. Perhaps a prologue to the Christian narrative, but nothing Islamic.

Where did the author(s) of the Quran get such an absurd idea, that Alexander, a hard-drinking, bisexual mushrik who believed himself the son of Zeus, was a pious Muslim prophet? As we saw earlier, Alexander had a great impact on the Middle East. Before the fool drank himself to death, he had plans of invading Arabia. what's more, Christians and Jews had a long history of storytelling and myth around Alexander. We've already seen what the Jews had to say about him in Daniel. Alexander not only left the Jews to their religion, but he even sacrificed at their temple. Alexander’s successors tried to bring modernity to Israel (which the Jews, not unlike certain groups today, did not take well to), and so the first few generation of Rabbinic literature is hostile to Alexander. But remembrance of Alexanders kindness and sacrifice did not go away, and as Judaism began to Hellenize, Alexander came to be seen in an increasingly good light. This fondness of Alexander (and the innumerable myths built around him in pagan literature- my favorite being his imagined encounters with Diogenes the Cynic in Dio Chrysostom's work and The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius) spilled over to Christian literature, where he came to have prophet like status. The feelings culminated in the Alexander Romances, collections of Christian legends about Alexander that emerge in the 3rd century. In the Ethiopic version of the Romances, Alexander is called the Two Horned Lord. Christian legend anticipates the Quranic myth of Alexander closing in Gog and Magog in almost every way. Let's see the Quranic text:


Now, for the Syriac text of the Romance:

So, it is all clear now. The author(s) of the Quran, in putting together their disparate material, included utterly inaccurate Arabian, Christian, and Jewish legends into the narrative, revealing the Quran to be nothing more than the work of man, most likely several men. Its displays an completely unscientific bent (accepting myths about the sun setting into a muddy spring) and is certainly the work of no perfect divine being.
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A dahri and proud of it

And they say: There is naught but our life of the world; we die and we live, and naught destroyeth us save time
- Surah 45:24

ChandraRama

I always wondered about this story in Quran. Now it is clear.
thanks

orangebaw

Have you read this article on the origins of the Koran? It's very interesting:

http://www.secularislam.org/research/origins.htm