There is, in rural Mandi Bahauddin district, a few kilometres from Phalia town, a village marked as Helan in the
Atlas of Pakistan.
The ‘a’ is pronounced as in ‘father’ and the ending is nasal as it
would be in French.
The village is known for a tomb dating to the reign
of Akbar the Great. In May 2000, I paused there, met a local ‘historian’ and learned that the word was a mispronunciation of Helen!
Now, it was well known that Helen of Troy,
said the man, was the wife of Alexander the Macedonian. When she died,
Alexander ordered this tomb. Inside, sits an ornate sandstone
sarcophagus radiant with flowing curvilinear forms and calligraphy that
tells us that the tomb is the last resting place of some Ali Beg. But
that did not matter to my new friend.
Later, in nearby Mong, the village that takes its name from the Scythian King Maues (1
st
century BCE), known as Moga in Punjabi, I got another educational
boost. Seeing that I was on the trail of Alexander, a rather contrary
sort of middle-aged man took me under his wing. He spoke of the
Macedonian’s victory over Raja Paurava (Greek: Porus) with admirable
pride and how folks named their sons after the Macedonian. I asked if
folks ever named a son after Paurava, he being one of our own. Pat came
an angry, “
Kyon? O koi Musalman cee?” Islam being nearly a
millennium in the future, Raja Paurava was certainly no Muslim. But then
neither was Alexander. On another similar occasion, my interlocutor
burst out with an incredulous half-question, half-statement, “Alexander
was Hindu?”
Interestingly, even semi-educated persons in Pakistan cannot imagine a
religion like the Greeks had, with a large pantheon of mostly
fun-loving gods. They are caught in a mental box with four names —
Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and a very distant and vague Judaism. No
other religion appears on their radar.
This man in Mong was smarter, however. He countered with the
statement that Alexander was mentioned in the Holy Quran. The king we so
desperately want to turn into Alexander is the Quranic Zulqarnain whose
name means ‘Two-Horned’. He travelled across the great expanse of the
world, ruled over a vast kingdom and was responsible for locking away
the dreaded nation of Gog and Magog behind a rubble wall steeped in
molten lead. This king, we read, travelled to the rising and setting
places of the sun. That is, his sway extended across much of the known
world of his time.
But scripture does not reveal anything beyond this short reference.
Now, there were two famous world-conquering kings in history who wore
horns on their helmets. Cyrus the Great
(ruled BCE 549-529) of Persia and, 200 years later, Alexander of
Macedonia. Indeed, the latter’s depiction on coinage with diadem and
ram’s horns is very well known.
Now, both were great conquerors, therefore, either could be
Zulqarnain. But mark: Cyrus established a kingdom only marginally
smaller than Alexander’s.
This kingdom lasted 200 years until Alexander unravelled it and
became master of it. Alexander’s kingdom was larger. His governors
presided on the affairs of men from Thrace (Bulgaria) through the
Scythian steppes on the northern shores of the Black Sea, to the banks
of the Jaxartes (Syr) River (in Uzbekistan) and across the entire
Persian Empire, Afghanistan, Punjab and Sindh to Babylon. But it was a
short-lived empire, lasting just over a decade until Alexander’s death
in 322 BCE.
So, really, which king was it that scripture refers to as the
‘Two-Horned’? If greatness were a measure in terms of longevity of
kingdom, I would vote Cyrus. However, Alexander who did indeed embody
traits that could arguably be termed ‘great’ left behind a kingdom that
did not last beyond his own lifetime.
But we, in Pakistan, embrace him. We stretch the words of scripture
to make Zulqarnain fit into Alexander’s shoes. We do this only because
he, an outsider, defeated a king of Punjab who, unfortunately, was a
Hindu. We disregard the fact that Raja Paurava (of whose greatness of
character I have written earlier in this column) was a Hindu because he
predated Islam.