The Three Journeys (18:85-98)
Journey West: Dhul-Qarnayn followed a path until reaching the furthest west — “he found it setting in a spring of dark mud” — and found a people there. The divine choice: punish them or treat them with good will. He chose justice: punish the wrongdoer; for the righteous, ease and reward.
Journey East: He followed another path to the furthest east — “he found it rising on a people for whom We had not made against it any shield” — people with no shelter from the sun. The Quran says simply that his knowledge of their situation was as Allah had made it.
The Third Journey: between two mountains (saddayn), he found a people who could barely understand speech (la yakaduna yafqahuna qawla) — isolated, perhaps pre-linguistic by ordinary standards. They offered to pay him if he would build a barrier against Gog and Magog, who were devastating their land. Dhul-Qarnayn refused payment — “what my Lord has established me in is better” — and built the barrier using iron blocks and molten copper.
Gog and Magog: The Eschatological Frame (18:98-99)
“He said, ‘This is a mercy from my Lord; but when the promise of my Lord comes, He will make it level, and ever is the promise of my Lord true.’ And We will leave them that day surging over each other.”
The barrier is explicitly temporary — it will be leveled at the time of divine promise. Gog and Magog appear in the Quran’s eschatological material as a sign of the approach of the Day of Judgment (21:96-97): “Until when Gog and Magog are let loose and they descend swiftly from every slope…”
Classical Identifications
- Alexander the Great (Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn): the most common classical identification; Alexander’s campaigns reached from Macedonia to India; the “two horns” = two kingdoms or two regions conquered. But Alexander was not a monotheist, and the Quran portrays Dhul-Qarnayn as divinely-guided
- Cyrus the Great: proposed by modern scholars; Cyrus was famously just and divinely-referenced in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 45)
- Quranic position: Allah knows best — the Quran provides his deeds and character without a name
See also: Signs Of Qiyamah, Prophets In Islam, Al Anbiya, Quran Sciences, Tafsir Overview, Seerah Sulaiman