Alexander the Great in Arabic tradition
[5] Likewise, Alexandrian texts feature among the earliest known texts translated from other languages into Arabic, such as the Rasāʾil Arisṭāṭālīsa ilāʾl-Iskandar (The Letters of Aristotle to Alexander or the Epistolary Romance), consisting of a set of apocryphal letters meant to confirm Alexander's reputation as a wise ruler produced during the reign of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743) from sources originally in Greek.
Versions of the Alexander Romance were repeatedly translated into Arabic from Syriac, Latin, and Hebrew throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the most popular being the Sirat al-Iskandar.
[15] Notably, the Abbasid caliph Al-Mu'tasim (794–842 AD) had ordered the translation of the Thesaurus Alexandri, a work on elixirs and amulets, from Greek and Latin into Arabic.
[16][17] In Secretum Secretorum ("Secret of Secrets", in Arabic Kitab sirr al-asrar), an encyclopedic Arabic treatise on a wide range of topics such as statecraft, ethics, physiognomy, alchemy, astrology, magic and medicine, Alexander appears as a speaker and subject of wise sayings and as a correspondent with figures such as Aristotle.
Other examples include the Tārīkh (Historiae) of al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 897), the al-Rusul waʾl-Mulūk (History of the Prophets and Kings, or simply Annales) of al-Tabbari (d. 923), the Murūj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold) of al-Masudi (d. 956), and the Naẓm al-Jawhar (String of Pearls) of Eutychius of Alexandria.
[19] The earliest full-length Arabic Alexander Romance was the Qissat al-Iskandar of ʿUmara ibn Zayd, composed in the late 8th or early 9th century.
[27] In the Sīrat, Alexander is a son of Dārāb, a prince of the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia, and Nāhīd, daughter of King Philip II of Macedon.
[28] After returning to Macedon, Alexander comes under the influence of the devil, Iblīs, until he is brought back to the right path by al-Khiḍr, who convinces him he has a divine mission: to convert the whole world to monotheism.
Alexander then constructs the famous wall confining Gog and Magog before setting out for the Land of Darkness to find the Water of Life.
[2] One representation was of Alexander as a strategist, especially in light of his vast conquests from such a small territory, including the subjugation of many lands that the Umayyads reconquered later.
One piece of advice was that Alexander should allow troops nightly drinking parties (a pre-Islamic recommendation which was not conformed into Islamic ethics in the text).
This is especially visible in wisdom literature, which included wise sayings, maxims, anthologies of anecdotes, and ascriptions of exemplary conduct on great figures from the past.
[31] One of the most famous elements of Alexander's biography was his concealment of Gog and Magog behind a barrier which they remain imprisoned by until the end of the world.
One tenth-century Arab geographer and chronicler, Ibn Hawqal, produced maps based on his own travels and inspired by earlier ones by Ptolemy.
Several expeditions in the Muslim world were undertaken to try to find and study Alexander's wall, specifically the Caspian Gates of Derbent.
Then when `Abdur Rehman wanted to advance towards Derbent, Shehrbaz [ruler of Armenia] informed him that he had already gathered full information about the wall built by Dhul-Qarnain, through a man, who could supply all the necessary details ...[33]Two hundred years later, the Abbasid Caliph Al-Wathiq (d. 847) dispatched an expedition to study the wall of Dhu al-Qarnayn in Derbent, Russia.
[34]The Muslim geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi further confirmed the same view in a number of places in his book on geography; for instance under the heading "Khazar" (Caspian) he writes:This territory adjoins the Wall of Dhul-Qarnain just behind Bab-ul-Abwab, which is also called Derbent.
"[35] The translator of the travel log notes that Ibn Battuta confused the Great Wall of China with that supposedly built by Dhul-Qarnayn.
According to Theodor Nöldeke in the late 19th century, the lost δ recension of the Greek Romance was translated into Middle Persian (Pahlavi).
[40] The Tārīkh al-Iskandar al-Makdūni (History of Alexander of Macedon), translated into Arabic by the Melkite bishop Yuwāsif ibn Suwaydān (c. 1669) from the Byzantine ζ-recension of Pseudo-Callisthenes.
[41] The study of the Arabic tradition of the Alexander Romance was founded by Theodor Nöldeke with his publication Beiträge zur geschichte des Alexanderromans in 1890.
[42] In 1901, Karl Friederich Weymann published a study on translations of the Romance into Arabic and Ethiopic, titled Die aethiopische und arabische Übersetzung des Pseudocallisthenes.
However, the existence of an Arabic translation would remain conjectural until the accidental discovery of a manuscript of the Hadith Dhulqarnayn (or the Leyenda de Alejandro) in 1929 by Emilio Garcia Gomez.
Lidzbarski believed that the ultimate (though not direct) source for the traditions in Ibn Hisham's work, at least respect to its description of the Fountain of Life, was to be sought in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Despite its importance, the book did not exert much influence on scholarship until later due to the attitude that existed that scholarly work on the Arabic Alexander tradition from the 19th century had already resolved the major questions.
Nagel pioneered a new way with dealing with the material in Ibn Hisham's Kitab, forsaking the older method of the comparative study of legend and instead aimed at deducing the earliest sources and origins of the different elements of the narrative.
He also placed the work in its historical and social context, viewing it as an autonomous literary phenomena that occupied a particular national consciousness.
In these decades, a few short surveys appeared of the oriental Arabic tradition, including that of Stephen Gero, Hamad Bin Seray, and a proceedings of a congress on Alexander published by Fahd, Mazzaoui, Macuch, and Marin.
Other recent developments include the work of the historian François de Polignac and, most importantly of all, the edition and translation of Islamic Legends Concerning Alexander the Great by Z. David Zuwiyya.
