Cyrus the Great in the Quran


Cyrus the Great in the Quran is a theory that identifies Dhul-Qarnayn, a figure mentioned in verses of the Quran, with Cyrus the Great.. Proposed by the German philologist G. M. Redslob in 1855, it failed to gain followers among Western scholars, but was taken up by several traditional Indian, Pakistani and Iranian scholars and commentators, including Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Israr Ahmed, Maududi, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, Allameh Tabatabaei, Naser Makarem Shirazi and Muhammad Ali.

Dhul-Qarnayn: Surat al-Kahf (surah 18), verses 83–101

The story of Dhul-Qarnayn is related in chapter 18 of the Quran. This chapter was revealed to Muhammad when his tribe, Quraysh, sent two men to discover whether the Jews, with their superior knowledge of the scriptures, could advise them on whether Muhammad was a true prophet of God. The rabbis told them to ask Muhammad about three things, one of them "about a man who travelled and reached the east and the west of the earth, what was his story". "If he tells you about these things, then he is a prophet, so follow him, but if he does not tell you, then he is a man who is making things up, so deal with him as you see fit."
The verses of the chapter reproduced below show Dhul-Qarnayn traveling first to the Western edge of the world where he sees the sun set in a muddy spring, then to the furthest East where he sees it rise from the ocean, and finally northward to a place in the mountains where he finds a people oppressed by Gog and Magog:
VerseAbdullah Yusuf AliPickthall
18:83.They ask thee concerning Zul-qarnain Say, "I will rehearse to you something of his story."They will ask thee of Dhu'l-Qarneyn. Say: "I shall recite unto you a remembrance of him."
18:84Verily We established his power on earth, and We gave him the ways and the means to all ends.Lo! We made him strong in the land and gave him unto every thing a road.
18:85One way he followed,And he followed a road
18:86Until, when he reached the setting of the sun, he found it set in a spring of murky water: near it he found a people: We said: "O Zul-qarnain!, either to punish them, or to treat them with kindness."Till, when he reached the setting-place of the sun, he found it setting in a muddy spring, and found a people thereabout. We said: "O Dhu'l-Qarneyn! Either punish or show them kindness."
18:87He said: "Whoever doth wrong, him shall we punish; then shall he be sent back to his Lord; and He will punish him with a punishment unheard-of.He said: "As for him who doeth wrong, we shall punish him, and then he will be brought back unto his Lord, Who will punish him with awful punishment!"
18:88"But whoever believes, and works righteousness, he shall have a goodly reward, and easy will be his task as we order it by our command.""But as for him who believeth and doeth right, good will be his reward, and We shall speak unto him a mild command."
18:89Then followed he way.Then he followed a road
18:90Until, when he came to the rising of the sun, he found it rising on a people for whom We had provided no covering protection against the sun.Till, when he reached the rising-place of the sun, he found it rising on a people for whom We had appointed no shelter therefrom.
18:91 as they were: We completely understood what was before him.So. And We knew all concerning him.
18:92Then followed he way.Then he followed a road
18:93Until, when he reached between two mountains, he found, beneath them, a people who scarcely understood a word.Till, when he came between the two mountains, he found upon their hither side a folk that scarce could understand a saying.-
18:94They said: "O Zul-qarnain! the Gog and Magog do great mischief on earth: shall we then render thee tribute in order that thou mightest erect a barrier between us and them?"They said: "O Dhu'l-Qarneyn! Lo! Gog and Magog are spoiling the land. So may we pay thee tribute on condition that thou set a barrier between us and them?"
18:95He said: " in which my Lord has established me is better : help me therefore with strength : I will erect a strong barrier between you and them:He said: "That wherein my Lord hath established me is better. Do but help me with strength, I will set between you and them a bank."
18:96"Bring me blocks of iron." At length, when he had filled up the space between the two steep mountain sides, he said, "Blow " then, when he had made it as fire, he said: "Bring me, that I may pour over it, molten lead.""Give me pieces of iron" – till, when he had leveled up between the cliffs, he said: "Blow!" – till, when he had made it a fire, he said: "Bring me molten copper to pour thereon."
18:97Thus were they made powerless to scale it or to dig through it.And were not able to surmount, nor could they pierce.
18:98He said: "This is a mercy from my Lord: but when the promise of my Lord comes to pass, He will make it into dust; and the promise of my Lord is true."He said: "This is a mercy from my Lord; but when the promise of my Lord cometh to pass, He will lay it low, for the promise of my Lord is true."
18:99On that day We shall leave them to surge like waves on one another: the trumpet will be blown, and We shall collect them all together.And on that day we shall let some of them surge against others, and the Trumpet will be blown. Then We shall gather them together in one gathering.
18:100And We shall present Hell that day for Unbelievers to see, all spread out,-On that day we shall present hell to the disbelievers, plain to view,
18:101 whose eyes had been under a veil from remembrance of Me, and who had been unable even to hear.Those whose eyes were hoodwinked from My reminder, and who could not bear to hear.

Cyrus the Great

Cyrus the Great was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, the first Persian Empire. Under his leadership the Persians, until that time an unimportant people in the hill country east of the plains of Mesopotamia, became a great empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus and north into Central Asia. This was the largest empire the world had yet seen.

Parallels between Dhul-Qarnayn and Cyrus

Dhul-Qarnain must have been familiar to the Jews, for it was at their instigation that the disbelievers of Mecca put their question to Muhammad.
The Book of Daniel, Chapter 8, says:
Gabriel then gives the interpretation: "As for the ram that you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia." The Jews had a high opinion of Cyrus the Great, because it was his invasion which brought about the downfall of the kingdom of Babylon and the liberation of the Israelites, and horns were a familiar symbol of power in the kingdoms of Mesopotamia.
Dhul-Qarnayn must have been a great ruler whose conquests spread from the East to the West and to the North.
The conquests of Cyrus spread to Syria and Asia Minor in the West and to the Indus in the East, and his kingdom extended to the Caucasus in the North.
Dhul-Qarnayn must be a ruler who constructed a strong wall across a mountain pass to protect his kingdom from the incursions of tribes or nations Gog and Magog.
Gog and Magog were the wild tribes of Central Asia who were known by different names, Scythians, Parthians, Tartars, Mongols, and Huns, who had been making incursions on various kingdoms and empires from very ancient times. Strong bulwarks had been built in southern regions of Caucasia, though it has yet to be determined historically whether these were built by Cyrus.
Dhul-Qarnayn should be a monotheist and a just ruler, since the Quran has stressed these characteristics.''
Even his enemies praised Cyrus for his justice, and Ezra asserts that he was a God-worshiper and a God-fearing king who set free the Israelites because of his God-worship, and ordered that the Temple of Solomon be rebuilt for the worship of God.

The three journeys

Journey towards the West

According to Ibn Kathir, it means that he followed a route to the West of the earth until he reached the last boundary of the land, beyond which there was ocean. Verse 18:86 says: "He found it setting in a muddy spring". If Dhul-Qarnain was Cyrus, then that place would be the western limit of Asia Minor and the "muddy spring" would be the Aegean Sea. The word "`ain" in Quran verse 18:86 means spring or source of water from the ground, as in other verses according to Lane's Lexicon:
The word "bahr" means sea or large body of water and appears in many other verses in the Quran to mean sea.

Journey towards the East

That is, when he advanced towards the East in Babylon, the people, who had no shelter were the captured tribes of Israel. The reason the Quran mentions no more on the topic is because the whole epic is written in the Book of Kings, of the Tanakh. The Quran simply says at 18:90, "To the extent that when he reached the rising-place of the sun, he found it rising upon a nation for which We had not kept any shelter from it."

Journey towards the North/Gog and Magog

The "two mountains" must have been parts of that mountain range which runs between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. This must be, for beyond them was the territory of Gog and Magog. "It was difficult to communicate with them: their language was almost foreign to Dhul-Qarnain and his companions, and, as they were quite barbaric, none could understand their language, nor were they acquainted with any foreign language."
As has already been pointed out, Gog and Magog were the wild tribes of North Eastern Asia which, from the very early times had been making inroads on settled kingdoms and empires in Asia and Europe and ravaging them. According to Genesis, they were the descendants of Japheth, the son of Noah, and the Muslim historians have also accepted this. And according to the book of Ezekiel, they inhabited the territories of Meshech and Tubal. According to the 1st century CE Israelite historian Josephus, Magog were called Scythians by the Greeks, and their territory spread to the north and the east of the Black Sea. However, Josephus also says that the Scythians had been shut up behind an iron gate built across a passage by Alexander . According to Jerome, Magog inhabited the territory to the north of Caucasia near the Caspian Sea:

Wall of Cyrus to protect from Gog & Mogog

He said: "Though I have built a very strong iron-wall, as far as it was possible for me, it is not ever-lasting, for it will last only as long as Allah wills, and will fall down to pieces when the time of my Lord's promise shall come. Then no power in the world shall be able to keep it safe and secure."
Some people have entertained the misunderstanding that the wall attributed here to Dhul-Qarnain refers to the famous Great Wall of China, whereas this wall was built between basit aliDerbent and Dar'yal, two cities of Daghestan in the Caucasus, the land that lies between the Black Sea and the Caspian. There are high mountains between the Black Sea and Dar'yal having deep gorges which cannot allow large armies to pass through them. Between Derbent and Dar'yal, however, there are no such mountains and the passes also are wide and passable. In ancient times savage hordes from the north invaded and ravaged southern lands through these passes and the Persian rulers who were fearful of them had to build a strong wall, 50 miles long, 29 feet high and 10 feet wide, for fortification purposes, ruins of which can still be seen. Though it has not yet been established historically who built this wall in the beginning, Muslim historians and geographers assign it to Dhul-Qarnain because its remains correspond with the description of it given in the Quran, despite the fact that the wall is in fact Sassanid in origins, and thus is about 1000 years too late to have been built by Cyrus. "The OSL and radiocarbon samples demonstrated conclusively that both walls had been built in the 5th or, possibly, 6th century AD".
Ibn Jarir Tabari and Ibn Kathir have recorded the event, and Yaqut al-Hamawi has mentioned it in his Mujam-ul-Buldan that: when after the conquest of Azerbaijan, Umar sent Suraqah bin `Amr, in 22 A.H. on an expedition to Derbent, the latter appointed `Abdur Rahman bin Rabi`ah as the chief of his vanguard. When 'Abdur Rehman entered Armenia, the ruler Shehrbaz surrendered without fighting. Then when `Abdur Rehman wanted to advance towards Derbent, Shehrbaz 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 and then the man was actually presented before `Abdur Rehman..
Two hundred years later, the Abbasid Caliph Al-Wathiq dispatched a party of 50 men under Sallam-ul-Tarjuman to study the wall of Dhul-Qarnain, whose observations have been recorded in great detail by Yaqut al-Hamawi in Mu jam-ul-Buldan and by Ibn Kathir in Al-Bidayah. They write:
this expedition reached Samarrah from where they reached Tbilisi and then through As-Sarir and Al-Lan, they reached Filanshah, from where they entered the Caspian territory. From there they arrived at Derbent and saw the wall.. This clearly shows that even up until the tenth century, Muslim scholars regarded this wall of the Caucasus as the wall of Dhul-Qarnain.
Yaqut in his Mu jam-ul-Buldan has further confirmed the same view at a number of places. For instance, under Khazar he writes:
Regarding Bab-ul-Abwab he says that this city is called both Al-Bab and Derbent, which is a highly difficult passage for the people coming from the northern lands towards the south. Once this territory was a part of the kingdom of Nausherwan, and the Persian rulers paid particular attention to strengthening their frontiers on that side.''
About Dhul-Qarnain, Muhammad Ali says :
The word qarn means a horn, as also a generation or a century and dhul qarnain literally means the two-horned one, or one belonging to the two generations or two centuries. The reference here seems to be to the two horned ram of Daniel's vision, which he interpreted as the Kingdoms of Media and Persia, which were combined into a single kingdom under one ruler, Cyrus, who is erroneously called Darius in the Bible. The reference in Daniel's vision is, however, not to Cyrus but to Darius I Hystaspes, "who allowed the Jews to rebuild their temple, and is referred to in Ezra 4:5,24;5:5;6:1;Hag1:1;2:10;Zech. 1;7, and probably in Neh. 12:22. His liberality towards the Jews is in complete accord with what we know otherwise of his general policy in religious matter towards the subject nations"
Maududi says:

Further indications