Alexander the Great in Islamic tradition
Alexander the Great was a king of ancient Greece and Macedon who forged one of the largest empires in world history. Soon after his death, a body of legend began to accumulate about his life and exploits. With the Greek Alexander Romance and its translation into numerous languages including Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Ethiopic, and more, an entire genre of literature was dedicated to the exploits of Alexander in both Christian and Muslim realms. Alexander was also the one most frequently identified with Dhu al-Qarnayn (Arabic: ذو القرنين; lit. "The Two-Horned One"), a figure that appears in Surah Al-Kahf in the Quran, the holy text of Islam, which greatly expanded the attention paid to him in the traditions of the Muslim world.
Arabic tradition
Most Islamic exegetes and commentators have identified the Quranic figure of Dhu al-Qarnayn (lit. 'The Two-Horned One') with Alexander the Great.[1][2][3] Following this, Alexander would quickly feature prominently in early Arabic literature often as Alexander, and his name would be closely tied with the Two-Horned title. There are many surviving versions of the Alexander Romance in Arabic that were written after the conquest of Islam. It is also thought that pre-Islamic Arabic versions of the Alexander Romance may have existed.[4]
The earliest surviving Arabic narrative of the Alexander Romance, the
A
The Alexander Romance also had an important influence on Arabic
In another example of Arabic wisdom literature relating to Alexander, Ibn al-Nadim (?–997 AD) refers to a work on divination titled The Drawing of Lots by Dhu al-Qarnayn and to a second work on divination by arrows titled The Gift of Alexander, but only the titles of these works have survived.
Notably, the
Another piece of Arabic Alexander literature is the Laments (or Sayings) of the Philosophers. These are a collection of remarks supposedly made by some philosophers gathered at the tomb of Alexander after his death. This legend was originally written in the 6th century in Syriac and was later translated into Arabic and expanded upon. The Laments of the Philosophers eventually gained enormous popularity in Europe.[8]
The
Persian tradition
With the
The Muslim traditions also elaborated the legend that Alexander the Great had been the companion of Aristotle and the direct student of Plato.
Andalusian tradition
After the
Central Asian tradition
Certain Muslim people of
In 1577 AD the Tsardom of Russia annexed control of the region and Bulgar Muslim writings concerning Dhul-Qarnayn do not appear again until the 18th and 19th centuries, which saw a resurgence of local Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn legends as a source of Muslim and ethnic identity:
It was only at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries that we begin to see historical legends concerning Iskandar Dhūl-Qarnayn reemerge among Volga-Kama Muslims, at least in written form, and it was not until the 19th century that such legends were recorded from local Muslim oral tradition. In one of his earliest historical works, entitled Ghilālat al-Zamān and written in 1877 the Tatar theologian, Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī wrote that according to Arabic and other Muslim writings, as well as according to popular legends, the city of Bulghar was founded by Alexander the Great.[19]
Malaysian tradition
The
Reception in non-Islamic texts
Commentary on the figure of Dhu al-Qarnayn by Christians is found in glosses on the Quran. For example, glosses on Quran 18:83–102 in Latin translations of the Quran demonstrates an unambiguous familiarity among Christian commenters that the passage they were reading was a story about the two-horned Alexander the Great.[31]
References
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- ^ a b c Stoneman 2003
- ^ Southgate, Minoo. S. Portrait of Alexander in Persian Alexander-Romances of the Islamic Era. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 97, No. 3, (July – September 1977), pp. 278-–284
- ^ Yucesoy, Hayrettin. Messianic Beliefs & Imperial Politics in Medieval Islam: The Abbasid Caliphate in the Early Ninth Century. 2009. University of South Carolina. pp. 122–123
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- ^ a b Doufikar-Aerts 2003, pp. 508–509.
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- ^ Zuwiyya, David Z. "Translation and the Arat of Recreation: The legend of Alexander the Great from the Pseudo-Callisthenes to the Aljamiado-Morisco Rrekontamiento del rrey Alisandre" in Sensus de sensu: Estudios Filológicos de traducción. Ed. Vicente López Folgado. Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba (2002). Pp. 243–263.
- ^ Zuwiyya, David Z. "The Hero of the Hispano-Arabic Alexander Romance Qissat Dhulqarnayn: Between al-Askander and Dhulqarnayn," Kalamazoo, Michigan, 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Spring 1999.
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- ^ Zuwiyya, Z. David (2011). "The Alexander Romance in the Arabic Tradition". In Z. David Zuwiyya (ed.). A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages. Brill. pp. 73–112.
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