Iskandar and al-Khiḍr in the Literatures of Islam: Political Power, Prophecy and Divination in the Legend of the Bath of Immortality

Classical Islam reserves a privileged role for the figure of Alexander the Great (Iskandar), to whom a few verses of the Koran are devoted with the epithet of Dhū’l-Qarnayn, the “Two-Horned” (Sura 18, 83-102). The legend concerning Alexander’s journey in search for the Source of Life, possibly originated in Jewish and Christian milieus, found its most sophisticated and articulated developments in countless texts of Arabic and Persian literatures, between the 8th and the 16th centuries, thus becoming the main narrative paradigm of Islamic reflection on immortality: denied to the political power (Iskandar never finds the Source), and allowed instead to the prophetical one (his guide, the sylvestrian prophet Khiḍr, who baths in it). Mapping the diverse uses of this legend and the various textual genres in which it appears in Arabic and Persian literatures (historiography, didactical handbooks, romances, cosmographies, religious works, divinatory texts, etc.) allows drawing a web of values and disvalues associated to immortality and its desire in the context of Islamic cultures. This paper will focus on the passage from the political function of this story to its more spiritual and then even divinatory readings, highlighting a relevant aspect of the transformation of Muslim intellectual attitudes in framing the nature of humankind, the physical world, and their laws, during the classical era.