The biography of Iskander Zulkarnayn should start with those ideas about him that we have thanks to the theology of Islam. So, according to Muslim beliefs, the end of the world will be marked by the release of Gog and Magog from the wall, and their destruction by God in one night will open the Day of Resurrection (Yawm al-Qiyāmah). The story entered the Qur'an through the Alexander Romance, the legendary version of the story of Alexander the Great. Many believe that the mythical Iskander Zulkarnayn - Alexander the Great in person, just with a slightly changed biography.
Origin
The story of this character is connected with chapter 18 (Surat al-Kaf, “Cave”) of the Koran. This chapter was opened to Muhammad when his tribe, Quraysh, sent two people to find out if Jews with their excellent scriptural knowledge could tell them whether Muhammad was a true prophet of God. The rabbis advised them to ask Muhammad about three things, and one of them was "about a man who traveled and reached the eastern and western world, which inscribed him in history." “If he tells you this, then he will be a prophet, so follow him, but if he does not tell you, then he is a person who is deceiving you, so treat him as you see fit.” (Verses 18: 83-98). Nothing is known about Iskander Zulkarnayn’s childhood. This circumstance, however, makes him an even more mysterious and stately figure.
Conqueror of East and West
The verses of the chapter mentioned above say that Iskander Zulkarnayn first goes to the western edge of the world, where he sees the sun, frozen in the sunset, and then to the farthest east, where he sees how it rises from the ocean, and finally to north, to a place in the mountains where he finds people oppressed by Gog and Magog. This story is still of great interest not only to Muslims, but also to all religious scholars.
The story of Iskander Zulkarnayn originates in the legends about the campaign of Alexander the Great in the Middle East, allegedly in the first years of the Christian era (in fact, at that time there was no Macedonian for a long time). According to these legends, the Scythians, the descendants of Gog and Magog, once defeated one of the generals of Alexander, after which the latter built a wall in the mountains of the Caucasus to keep them from civilized lands (the main elements of the legend were found at Josephus Flavius). The story of Alexander was much more elaborated in the following centuries, before ultimately finding his way to the Koran through the Syrian version.
Two-horned ruler
Alexander (Iskander Sulkarnayn) was already known as the "two-horned" in these early legends. The reasons for this are somewhat unclear: the scientist al-Tabari (839-923 AD) believed that he moved from one limb (“horn”) of the world to another, but ultimately it can be obtained from the image of Alexander, dressed in the horns of the god Zeus-Ammon, whose image was popularized on coins throughout the Hellenistic Middle East. The wall may have reflected a distant view of the Great Wall of China (a 12th-century student al-Idrisi made a map for Roger of Sicily, depicting the Land of Gog and Magog in Mongolia) or various Persian walls of the Sassanids built in the Caspian region to protect against northern barbarians.
The man who conquered the world
Iskander Sulkarnayn also travels to the western and eastern expanses of the Earth. In the west, he finds the sun in a "dirty spring", which is equivalent to the "poisonous sea" found by Alexander in a Syrian legend. In the Syrian original, Alexander experienced the poisonous properties of the sea, sending convicted prisoners into it. In the east, both the Syrian legend and the Qur'an mean by the associates of Alexander / Zulkarnayn people who are not adapted to the hot sun, which makes their skin suffer very much.
Man of two centuries
It is worth saying a few words about the name of Iskander Zulkarnayn, photos of statues or murals with which it is simply impossible to find due to the ban on the image of people in Islam. The word Qarn ("karn") means not only "horn", but also "period" or "century", and therefore the name Dhul-Qarnayn (Dhur-Karnayn, Sulkarnayn) has a symbolic meaning as "a man of two centuries", the first of which It is a mythological time when the wall is built, and the second is the end of the world, when the Sharia of Allah, the divine law, is removed, and Gog and Magog are freed. Modern Islamic apocalyptic writers, adhering to a literal reading, put forward various explanations for the lack of a wall in the modern world: some said that Gog and Magog were Mongols and that now the wall disappeared, others that both the wall and Gog and Magog are present, but invisible.
Ghazali Testimonials
Iskander Sulkarnayn-traveler was a favorite subject for later authors. In one of the many Arabic and Persian versions of the meeting of Alexander with Indian sages, the poet and philosopher Al-Ghazali (Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, 1058-1111) wrote about how our hero met people who did not have any possessions, but dug graves at the doors of their houses; their king explained that they did this because the only certainty in life is death. The Ghazali version later hit The Thousand and One Nights.
Testimonies of Rumi
The Sufi poet Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, 1207-1273), perhaps the most famous of the medieval Persian poets, described the eastern journey of Zulkarnayn. The hero climbs Mount Kof, the “mother” of all other mountains (identified with the Alborz Mountains on the northern border of Iran), which is made of emerald and forms a ring that surrounds the entire Earth with veins under each country. At the request of Iskander, the mountain explains the origin of the earthquakes: when God wishes, the mountain makes one of its emerald veins pulsate, and thus an earthquake occurs. In another testimony on a great mountain, the great conqueror meets Efrafil (archangel Raphael), ready to blow the doomsday.
Zulkarnayn in the Malay epic
The Malayan epic Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain traces the pedigree of several royal families of Southeast Asia, such as the royal family of Sumatra Minankabau from Iskander Zulkarnayn. It is amazing that the tales and testimonies of Alexander reached even Indonesia and Malaysia, leaving their mark on the culture of these distant mysterious countries.
"Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnayn" is a Malay epic describing the fictitious exploits of Iskander Zulkarnayn (Alexander the Great), the king who was briefly mentioned in the Qur'an (18: 82-100). The oldest existing manuscript dates from 1713, but is in poor condition. Another manuscript was copied by Muhammad Singh Saidullah around 1830.
Iskandar Zulkarnayn is said to be a direct forerunner of the Minangkabau kingdoms in Sumatra, Indonesia, and an ancestor of the rulers of these lands.