The biography of Iskander Zulkarnain should be started with the 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 behind the wall, and their destruction by God in one night will open the Day of Resurrection (Yawm al-Qiyāmah). The story entered the Koran through the Alexander Romance, a legendary version of the story of Alexander the Great. Many believe that the mythical Iskander Zulkarnayn is Alexander the Great in person, just with a slightly changed biography.
Origin
The story of this character is related to chapter 18 (Surat al-Kahf, "The Cave") of the Koran. This chapter was revealed to Muhammad when his tribe, the Quraysh, sent two men to see if the Jews, with their superior knowledge of the scriptures, 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 east andWestern world, which made it history. "If he tells you about it, then he will be a prophet, so follow him, but if he does not tell you, then he is a person who deceives you, so treat him as you see fit." (Verses 18:83-98). At the same time, nothing is known about the childhood of Iskander Zulkarnain. This circumstance, however, makes him an even more mysterious and majestic figure.
Conqueror of East and West
In the verses of the chapter mentioned above, it is said that Iskander Zulkarnayn first goes to the western outskirts 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 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 for Muslims, but for all religious scholars.
The story of Iskander Zulkarnain originates in the legends about the campaign of Alexander the Great in the Middle East supposedly in the first years of the Christian era (in fact, there was no Macedonian for a long time at that time). According to these legends, the Scythians, the descendants of Gog and Magog, once defeated one of Alexander's generals, 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 are found in Josephus). Alexander's story was much more developed in later centuries before eventually finding its way into the Quran through the Syriac version.
Two-horned ruler
Alexander (Iskander Zulkarnayn) was already known as "two-horned" in these early legends. The reasons for this are somewhat obscure: the scholar al-Tabari (839-923 CE) believed that he passed from one limb ("horn") of the world to another, but he may ultimately be derived from the image of Alexander dressed into the horns of the god Zeus-Ammon, whose image was popularized on coins throughout the Hellenistic Near East. The wall may have reflected a distant idea of the Great Wall of China (the 12th century student al-Idrisi mapped for Roger of Sicily depicting the Land of Gog and Magog in Mongolia) or the various Sassanid Persian walls built in the Caspian region to protect against northern barbarians.
The man who conquered the world
Iskander Zulkarnayn also travels across 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 Syrian legend. In the Syriac original, Alexander tested the poisonous properties of the sea by sending condemned prisoners into it. In the East, both the Syrian legend and the Koran mean by the associates of Alexander / Zulkarnain people who are not adapted to the hot sun, which causes their skin to suffer very much.
Man of two centuries
It is worth saying a few words about the name of Iskander Zulkarnain, photos of statues or frescoes 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"age", and therefore the name Dhul-Qarnayn (Dhur-Qarnayn, Zulkarnayn) has a symbolic meaning as "a man of two centuries", the first of which is the 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 absence of the wall in the modern world: some said that Gog and Magog were Mongols, and that now the wall has disappeared, others that both the wall and Gog and Magog are present, but invisible.
Ghazali's Testimony
Iskander Zulkarnayn the Traveler was a favorite subject for later writers. In one of the many Arabic and Persian versions of Alexander's meeting with the 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. Ghazali's version later made it into Thousand and One Nights.
Rumi's testimonies
The Sufi poet Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, 1207-1273), perhaps the most famous of the medieval Persian poets, described Zulkarnain's eastern journey. The hero climbs Mount Qof, the "mother" of all other mountains (identified with the mountains of Alborz on the northern border of Iran), which is made of emerald and forms a ring,surrounding the whole Earth with veins under each country. At the request of Iskander, the mountain explains the origin of earthquakes: when God wishes, the mountain makes one of its emerald veins pulsate, and thus an earthquake occurs. In another testimony, on the great mountain, the great conqueror meets Ephrafil (the archangel Raphael), who is ready to sound the beginning of the Day of Judgment.
Zulkarnayn in the Malay epic
The Malay epic Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain traces the lineage of several southeast Asian royal families such as the Sumatra Minankabau royal family of Iskandar Zulkarnain. It is amazing that stories and testimonies about Alexander even reached Indonesia and Malaysia, leaving their mark on the culture of these distant mysterious countries.
"Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain" is a Malay epic describing the fictional exploits of Iskandar Zulkarnain (Alexander the Great), a king who was briefly mentioned in the Qur'an (18:82-100). The oldest manuscript in existence dates from 1713 but is in poor condition. Another manuscript was copied by Muhammad Sing Saidullah around 1830.
Iskandar Zulkarnain is claimed to be the direct predecessor of the Minangkabau kingdoms in Sumatra, Indonesia, and the ancestor of the rulers of these lands.
