101 Reasons Why We Left Islam – Chapter 4: Islamic History – Reason 52
The Quran presents the story of Zul-Qarnayn, meaning “The Two-Horned One,” in Quran (18:83–101). He is depicted as a powerful, righteous ruler whom Allah grants authority over the Earth and the means to achieve great success. The Quran presents three episodes: First, he travels west to where the sun sets in a “muddy spring,” encountering a people whom he judges, punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous. Second, he travels east to where the sun rises, finding a people unprotected from its heat. Third, he reaches a region between two mountains where locals seek his help against Gog and Magog, mystical barbaric tribes. Zul-Qarnayn constructs an iron and copper barrier to contain them, declaring it a mercy from Allah, destined to crumble only when God wills, signalling the end times. The Quran portrays him as a monotheist servant of Allah, just and capable, though it provides no explicit name or historical timeframe.
Where do you want me to start with this narration of a historical figure! Each and every stage of this story has historical and scientific issues.
Musa Cerantonio, a famous Australian Muslim revert, left Islam specifically because of this story. He challenged this story by arguing it derives from pre-Islamic legends rather than divine revelation, undermining the Quran’s claim of its divine originality. He and many Christians point to striking parallels with the Syriac Alexander Legend, dated by some to 610–630 CE (though others suggest an earlier 6th-century origin), which describes Alexander the Great travelling to the world’s edges and building a wall against Gog and Magog. This is a pure fabricated fairytale story, part of the broader Alexander Romance—a fictionalized Greek account from the 3rd century CE—includes embellishments like the sun setting in a dark, dirty sea, mirroring Quran 18:86’s “muddy spring.” The story evidences that living in a 7th-century Arabian desert that was rich in Jewish, Christian, and Syriac tales ended up incorporating this fairytale and mistaking it for actual historical events. Cerantonio, a devout preacher of Islam for 17 years, cited this in a 2021 letter from prison, arguing that translating the Aramaic Alexander Romance revealed the Quran’s reliance on a fabricated tale. Abdullah Sameer, a famous YouTuber, left Islam in part because of his story, as he mentioned the ridiculous story in his first-ever video on leaving Islam. He asked that in times of Google maps that can see every corner of the world, can someone point where this iron and copper barrier that contains Gog and Magog is?
Further challenges arise from historical inaccuracies. The Quran’s Zul-Qarnayn is a monotheist, yet Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) was a well-documented polytheist who claimed divine descent from Zeus-Ammon. This is in complete contrast to the Islamic figure presented in the Quran. Moreover, Alexander’s campaigns never reached a “muddy spring” in the West, nor did they build a literal Gog-Magog barrier, suggesting that the story blends myth with reality. The Romance’s influence, evidenced by its circulation in Syriac Christian communities near Arabia, is evidence that the stories of the Quran cannot be divine with such as plagiarised content from a fairytale.
All these issues have made it very hard even for some Islamic Dawah and Scholars to make excuses for it. Some Muslim scholars moved away from identifying Zul-Qarnayn as Alexander due to these discrepancies. Classical commentators like Al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir clearly linked the two, influenced by Alexander’s prominence in regional lore and his “two-horned” depiction on coins. However, modern scholars like Naser Makarem Shirazi reject this, citing Alexander’s short life (died at 33) and paganism, incompatible with the Quran’s long-lived, pious ruler. Now, several modern scholars suggest that ‘maybe’ the Quran is referring to Cyrus the Great (d. 530 BCE), a Persian king praised in the Bible (Isaiah 45) as a liberator whose empire spanned east and west, aligning with the Quran’s geographic scope. That did not solve the problem. Cyrus the Great may have been a monotheist, not an Ibrahimic one, as he is a Zoroastrian. So, again, some scholars were left scrambling for another figure! In the end, some propose a possible pre-Islamic Arabian figure or a symbolic archetype, not a historical person. This shift reflects unease with the Alexander Romance connection, as its fictional nature—dated after Surah 18’s Meccan period (615–619 CE) by some—raises questions about timing and authenticity, making it yet another reason to question the sources of historical accounts, of the Quran.