the world and propagate the faith of Abraham, who is considered a prophet in Islam. Various Malay sultans claimed to be descendants of Alexander the Great and were named after him. Orientalist and western views In the 19th century, Orientalists studying the Quran began researching the identity of Dhul-Qarnayn. Theodor Nöldeke, believed that Dhul-Qarnayn was none other than Alexander the Great as mentioned in versions of the Alexander romance and related literature in Syriac (a dialect of Middle Aramaic). The Syriac manuscripts were translated into English in 1889 by E. A. Wallis Budge. In the early 20th century Andrew Runni Anderson wrote a series of articles on the question in the Transactions of the American Philological Association. The findings of the philologists imply that the source of the Quran's story of Dhul-Qarnayn is the Alexander romance, a thoroughly embellished compilation of Alexander's exploits from Hellenistic and early Christian sources, which underwent numerous expansions and revisions for two-thousand years, throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As can be seen in the following quotation from Edwards, secular philologists studying ancient Syriac Christian legends about Alexander the Great also came to the conclusion that Dhul-Qarnayn is an ancient epithet for Alexander the Great. Edwards says, Alexander's association with two horns and with the building of the gate against Gog and Magog occurs much earlier than the Quran and persists in the beliefs of all three of these religions [Judaism, Christianity and Islam]. The denial of Alexander's identity as Dhul-Qarnain is the denial of a common heritage shared by the cultures which shape the modern world—both in the east and the west. The popularity of the legend of Alexander the Great proves that these cultures share a history which suggests that perhaps they are not so different after all.Although modern academics have found that the oldest Alexander romance does not contain the episode where Alexander build the gates against Gog and Magog,The Syriac tradition is one of the most interesting versions of the many existing oriental redactions of the Romance. It dates from the 7th century and goes back on a quite similar Vorlage of the Greek recensio vetusta (n).4 The Syrian redactor, probably an East Syrian Christian, added a certain number of until then unknown episodes to the text. The episode of Alexander's building a wall against Gog and Magog, however, is not found in the oldest Greek, Latin, Armenian and Syriac versions