Qissat Dhulqarnayn

The Qiṣṣat Dhī ʾl-Qarnayn (Qissat Dhulqarnayn, "Story of Dhulqarnayn") is a Hispano-Arabic legend of Alexander the Great preserved in two fourteenth-century manuscripts in Madrid and likely dates as a ninth-century Arabic translation of the Syriac Alexander Romance produced in Al-Andalus. In this respect, it is similar to the Hadīth Dhī ʾl-Qarnayn and is an example of the literary genre of Qisas al-Anbiya (Stories of the Prophets). It is to be distinguished from another text also known as the Qissat Dhulqarnayn found in the book of prophets by al-Tha'labi (d. 1036) as well as the Qiṣṣat al-Iskandar, a text dating to the late eighth or early ninth century representing the earliest translation of the Alexander Romance into Arabic. The Qissat depicts the travels of Alexander whom it identifies with the figure named Dhu al-Qarnayn ("The Two Horned One") in Surah al-Kahf of the Quran, referred to as Dhulqarnayn in the text (in Arabic-language Alexander traditions, Alexander was variously called "Dhu l-Qarnayn", "al-Iskandar Dhūl-qarnayn", or sometimes just "Dhūlqarnayn"). The Qissat depicts Alexander (Dhulqarnayn) as a faithful believer and as a proto-Muslim who spreads monotheism through his conquests. It combines elements of pre-Islamic Alexander legends in addition to novel traditions developed in the oral Arab-Islamic tradition. Using the Islamic citation method of isnad, the text prefaces each narrative episode with a chain of transmitters that root in one of Muhammad's companions. Its primary transmitters are given as Ka'b al-Ahbar, Ibn 'Abbas, Muqatil ibn Sulayman, 'Abd al-Malik al-Mashuni, and 'Abd al-Malik b. Zayd. An English translation of the Qissat Dhulqarnayn was first produced by David Zuwiyya in 2001.