Dhul-Qarnayn

Blocks of iron, stacked into a gap between two cliffs until the pile stood level with the clifftops. Then the bellows, working until the whole mass glowed. Then molten metal carried up and poured down the face of it, and the people who had asked for the thing standing well back from the heat. When it cooled they had a barrier that could not be climbed and could not be cut through, and on the far side of it were the nations whose escape would mean the end of the world.

The man who built it is not really named. Twenty verses of Surah al-Kahf, the Cave, call him Dhul-Qarnayn, the Two-Horned One, and that epithet stands in for whoever he was. The passage even opens on somebody else’s question. They ask you about the Two-Horned One; say, I will relate to you a remembrance of him. God then grants him power in the earth and a way to follow, and he follows it three times.

The first way runs west, to the setting-place of the sun, where he finds it going down into a spring the Arabic calls ḥamiʾa, a word English versions render as muddy and scholars sometimes as fetid. There are people living around the water. God puts a choice to him: punish them, or treat them well. He stands at the edge of a sunset that is happening in front of him rather than above him, in air that stinks, with a settlement at his back waiting on his answer. The wrongdoer he will punish, he says, and afterwards God will punish him far worse. The one who believes and does right will have the best reward and an easy word from him. That is the entire portrait of a just king, and the story does not pause over it.

The second way runs east, to the rising-place, where the sun comes up over a people for whom God had appointed no shelter from it. Nothing else is said about them. No houses, no shade, no crops, just a country where the sun arrives with nothing at all between it and the ground.

The third way runs north, to a point between two barriers, where he finds people who can barely follow speech. They get the problem across anyway. Yajuj and Majuj, Gog and Magog, are ruining the land, and would he accept a payment to build a wall between. He refuses the money. What my Lord has established me in is better, he tells them, so help me with strength instead. Bring me blocks of iron. When the gap was filled to the height of the two cliffs: blow. When the iron was fire: bring me molten metal to pour on it. Gog and Magog could not surmount it and could not pierce it.

Then comes the line that Islamic tradition has been living with ever since. This is a mercy from my Lord, he says, and when my Lord’s promise comes, He will level it to dust. The wall is not permanent. It is a delay with a date on it.

Which is why a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari has the Prophet coming in to Zaynab bint Jahsh in a state of alarm, saying that an opening had been made that day in the barrier of Gog and Magog, this big, and holding up a ring made of his thumb and forefinger. Zaynab asked whether they would be destroyed with righteous people still among them. He said yes, when corruption increases.

Nobody knows what he looked like. There are no horns in the text either, only the name insisting that he has them. Alexander the Great was being shown horned on coinage within his own lifetime, and the two-horned epithet stayed fastened to him for centuries across the late antique east, which is where the difficulty begins.

In 1889 E. A. Wallis Budge edited a short Syriac work called the Neshana of Alexander, roughly the Glorious Deeds of Alexander. The following year Theodor Nöldeke read it and argued that this text, rather than the sprawling Alexander Romance, lay behind the Qur’anic passage. In the Syriac, Alexander prays to the God who set the horns on his head, and asks for power over the whole earth. He travels to the window of heaven where the sun goes in at evening. He reaches the eastern country where the ground grows too hot to touch and the inhabitants hide in caves and in the sea. He borrows seven thousand Egyptian workers in brass and iron. He goes north into the mountains, hears the locals out on the Huns beyond the pass, whose kings are named to him and the first two of whom are Gog and Magog, and builds them a wall of brass and iron. Then he writes a prophecy on the gate.

The prophecy is what dates the text. Alexander gives two intervals. After 826 years the Huns will break through, which converts to 514 or 515, the year the Sabirs came down into Syria and Anatolia. After 940 years there will be a war of all nations, which converts to 628 or 629, the close of the long Roman and Persian war of 603 to 630. G. J. Reinink read the whole work as a piece of writing made shortly after 628, probably in 629 or 630 somewhere near Amida or Edessa, in support of the emperor Heraclius, who had just won that war and was about to carry the True Cross back into Jerusalem. The Syriac ends with Alexander setting his own throne in Jerusalem for the Messiah to sit on. Kevin van Bladel went through the two texts line by line and found the correspondences exact and in the same order: the fetid water, the wall of iron and brass, the barbarians who scarcely count as human, the prophecy of nations falling on one another. What the Arabic keeps is the first prophecy. What it drops entirely is the second one, the promise of a universal Christian Roman empire. Not everyone accepts the descent. Stephen Gero took a date of 629 as simply too late for the material to have reached the people who related the Qur’an, and Nöldeke’s case had in any event gone quiet in Qur’anic studies for the better part of a century.

The wall itself acquired an address. Greek and Latin writers from Josephus onward had Alexander gating a Caucasian pass, usually the Darial gorge; by the seventh century the identification had slid east to the enormous Sasanian wall at Darband on the Caspian shore, a real structure carrying real Pahlavi inscriptions, any one of which might plausibly be taken for his. So when the caliph al-Wathiq woke from a dream that the barrier had been breached, there was a place to send somebody. He sent Sallam al-Tarjuman, a court interpreter credited with thirty languages, who was gone twenty-eight months, went up through the Caucasus and Khazaria, came home by Khurasan to Samarra, and lost about thirty-six of his party on the way. He reported the wall’s dimensions, the Qur’anic verse written across it, and a small isolated Muslim garrison living beside it who had never heard of the caliphate. Gog and Magog, he confirmed, were still inside. He also brought a piece of the wall home with him. A man twenty-eight months on the road does not come back with nothing.

His powers, such as they are, are all on loan, and the text is careful about it. God granted him the power. God gave him the way. God put the choice to him at the western spring. What he has of his own is command over labour and iron and fire, and the nerve to put something solid between a frightened people and the thing that frightens them. What he cannot do is make it last. He says so himself, in the same breath as the boast, and no one else in the story is willing to say it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dhul-Qarnayn in the Quran?

Dhul-Qarnayn is a righteous world-traveller who appears in Surah al-Kahf, chapter 18 of the Quran, where God grants him power in the earth and a course to follow to its edges. He journeys west to the setting-place of the sun, east to its rising-place, and north to a mountain pass, where he builds an iron barrier to seal off the nations of Gog and Magog. The Quran never gives him a personal name, only the epithet Dhul-Qarnayn, “the Two-Horned One.”

Is Dhul-Qarnayn the same person as Alexander the Great?

The Quran does not say who he was, and the question has been argued over ever since. Modern scholarship, beginning with Theodor Nöldeke in 1890 and developed by G. J. Reinink and Kevin van Bladel, traces the Quranic passage to a Syriac text about Alexander known as the Alexander Legend, written around 629 or 630 in support of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius. In that Syriac text God sets horns on Alexander’s head and Alexander builds the wall against the Huns. Not all scholars accept the connection, and Stephen Gero argued that a date of 629 is too late for the story to have reached the Quran’s audience.

What is the wall of Dhul-Qarnayn made of?

It is made of iron and molten metal. In the Quran he asks for blocks of iron, has them stacked until they are level with the tops of two cliffs, has fires blown until the mass is glowing, and then pours molten metal over the whole thing. The Syriac Alexander Legend describes the same wall as brass and iron and has Alexander borrow seven thousand Egyptian metalworkers in those two materials to build it.

Does the wall of Gog and Magog still stand?

In Islamic tradition it stands, but not for good. Dhul-Qarnayn’s own last words in the passage are that the barrier is a mercy from God and that when God’s promise arrives He will level it to dust. A hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari has Muhammad waking in alarm and reporting that an opening had already been made in it the size of a ring formed by his thumb and forefinger. In the ninth century the caliph al-Wathiq sent an expedition under Sallam al-Tarjuman to inspect the wall after dreaming that it had been breached; Sallam returned after twenty-eight months and reported it intact.

Why is he called the Two-Horned One?

The Quran uses the epithet without explaining it, and gives him no physical description at all. Alexander the Great was depicted with horns on coinage in his own lifetime and the two-horned title remained attached to him across the late antique Near East, which is one reason the Quranic figure and Alexander were so widely identified with each other. The Syriac Alexander Legend has Alexander pray to the God who put the horns on his head, and describes them once as horns of iron.

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Gog, Gogmagog, Dajjal, Israfil, Iblis, Shaitan, Djinn, Ifrit, Marid, Azrael, Buraq (Burak), Moses, Aeternae, Gordias