Few transformations in historical memory rival the metamorphosis of Alexander the Great into Dhul-Qarnayn—the 'Two-Horned One' of Islamic tradition. The Macedonian king who burned Persepolis and claimed divine descent became, in medieval Muslim thought, a righteous monotheist, a seeker of wisdom, and a figure who walked with prophets.

This is not merely a case of cultural borrowing or historical confusion. The Islamization of Alexander represents a sophisticated process of memorial assimilation—the absorption of a foreign historical figure into a new religious and cultural framework through deliberate reinterpretation. Understanding how this transformation occurred reveals fundamental mechanisms by which collective memory operates across civilizational boundaries.

The Alexander who emerges from medieval Islamic sources bears little resemblance to the figure in Greek and Roman historiography. Yet this Islamic Alexander was not invented from nothing. He was constructed through layers of textual transmission, theological interpretation, and literary elaboration that spanned centuries and multiple cultural traditions. Tracing this construction illuminates how historical memory serves present needs rather than preserving past realities.

The Quranic passage concerning Dhul-Qarnayn in Surah al-Kahf (18:83-98) presents a figure of remarkable indeterminacy. The text describes a powerful ruler who travels to the rising and setting places of the sun, builds a barrier against Gog and Magog, and refuses reward for his deeds. Critically, the Quran never identifies this figure by name.

This textual ambiguity created what we might call an 'interpretive vacuum'—a space that demanded filling by subsequent generations of Muslim scholars and storytellers. The question 'Who was Dhul-Qarnayn?' became a site of exegetical debate from the earliest period of Quranic interpretation.

Several candidates were proposed, including South Arabian kings and Persian monarchs. But Alexander—already legendary throughout the Near East—emerged as the dominant identification by the ninth century CE. The philological connection proved seductive: Alexander's coins depicted him with ram's horns of Zeus-Ammon, and 'Dhul-Qarnayn' means 'possessor of two horns.'

What makes this identification historiographically significant is not whether it is 'correct' but what it reveals about memorial dynamics. The Quranic Dhul-Qarnayn is unambiguously pious—he acknowledges divine sovereignty, dispenses justice, and displays humility. By identifying him with Alexander, Muslim interpreters effectively baptized the pagan conqueror, retroactively granting him Islamic credentials.

This process of identification demonstrates how sacred texts can absorb secular historical figures. The Quran's silence on Dhul-Qarnayn's identity was not a problem but an opportunity. It allowed Muslim culture to claim Alexander while transforming him—to make the conqueror of the Persian Empire into a servant of the One God.

Takeaway

Sacred texts create interpretive spaces that later generations fill according to their own cultural needs—textual ambiguity is not a deficiency but an invitation to memorial construction.

Alexander's journey into Islamic memory did not begin with the Quran. It traveled through Persian literary tradition, which had already subjected the Macedonian king to centuries of transformation. Understanding this transmission history is essential for grasping how the Islamic Alexander came to be.

The Sasanian Persian attitude toward Alexander was deeply ambivalent. On one hand, he was the accursed destroyer who burned the royal archives and ended the Achaemenid dynasty. On the other, Iranian traditions had already begun rehabilitating him, sometimes depicting him as a descendant of Persian royalty—a legitimizing genealogy that made his conquest a kind of homecoming.

This rehabilitative tradition found its fullest expression in the Iskandarnama literature—the Alexander romances that proliferated in Persian from the tenth century onward. Firdawsi's Shahnameh integrated Alexander into Iranian epic history, while Nizami's twelfth-century romance transformed him into a philosopher-king who travels the world seeking wisdom.

The Persian Alexander served as a vector of transmission into Arabic and Turkish Islamic cultures. When Muslim scholars encountered Alexander, they encountered him already clothed in Persian garments—already partially assimilated to Near Eastern religious and ethical frameworks. The Greek sources that depicted Alexander's divine pretensions and brutal conquests were largely unavailable or ignored.

This Persian mediation explains a crucial feature of Islamic Alexander memory: its selectivity. The traditions that entered Islamic culture emphasized Alexander's wisdom-seeking, his encounters with sages, and his ultimate recognition of human mortality. The massacres, the destruction of Persepolis, the execution of Parmenion—these were filtered out or minimized. Historical memory, transmitted across cultural boundaries, undergoes systematic transformation.

Takeaway

Historical figures who cross cultural boundaries do not arrive intact—they travel through intermediary traditions that reshape them according to different values before the receiving culture ever encounters them.

Perhaps the most striking feature of medieval Islamic Alexander memory is his transformation into a vehicle for wisdom literature. The conqueror who died at thirty-two, reportedly after excessive drinking, became in Islamic tradition a seeker of immortality who learned humility through failure—and a student of Aristotle who disseminated Greek philosophy.

This integration occurred through multiple textual genres. The Sirr al-Asrar (Secret of Secrets), claiming to be Aristotle's political advice to Alexander, circulated widely in the medieval Islamic world. Collections of Alexander's supposed aphorisms appeared in ethical compendia. Stories of his encounters with Indian sages and mysterious prophets proliferated.

What these texts share is a didactic function. Alexander became a frame narrative for conveying Islamic philosophical and ethical teachings. His legendary travels provided settings for wisdom encounters; his ultimate mortality provided a memento mori. The historical Alexander—whoever he was—became irrelevant to these purposes.

The wisdom literature Alexander demonstrates a key principle of memorial transformation: historical figures can become empty vessels that later cultures fill with their own content. The name 'Alexander' or 'Iskandar' carried enormous prestige and recognition. By attaching teachings to this name, Muslim authors gave their wisdom immediate authority and wide circulation.

This instrumentalization of Alexander extended to legitimation politics. Muslim rulers from the Abbasids to the Timurids invoked Alexander as a predecessor—a world-conqueror who was also righteous. His memory served dynastic ideology, providing a prestigious model that was simultaneously Islamic and universal. The Islamic Alexander thus reveals how historical memory operates as a resource for power, not merely as passive recollection.

Takeaway

When historical figures achieve sufficient prestige, they transform from subjects of memory into containers for new content—their names become authorization devices for whatever teachings or claims cultures wish to legitimize.

The Islamic Alexander demonstrates that historical memory is not simply preserved or lost—it is actively constructed across cultural boundaries through processes of selection, transformation, and reinterpretation. The figure who emerges bears the name of the original but serves entirely different memorial purposes.

What changed Alexander from pagan conqueror to righteous king was not new historical evidence but new cultural needs. Islamic civilization required prestigious exemplars of monotheistic kingship and philosophical wisdom. Alexander's legend, already transformed by Persian transmission, provided raw material that Muslim scholars and storytellers shaped to these requirements.

The strange afterlife of Alexander in Islamic memory reminds us that all historical memory operates similarly—though rarely so dramatically. Every generation reconstructs the figures it inherits according to its own values and needs. The past we remember is always, in part, a reflection of the present that remembers.