Islamic Alexanders in Southeast Asia

2
Islamic Alexanders in Southeast

Asia
Conquest of Constantinople consolidated Ottoman control over eastern Mediterranean

trade routes that connected to the ancient silk roads. Forced to seek alternate means to
spices and other Asian imports, the Portuguese began explorations around the African
continent. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1498
Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in India and reportedly declared, “We come in search
of Christians and spice” (Vimos buscar cristãos e especiaria).1 Portuguese entry into the
Indian Ocean set off a struggle with the Ottomans for control of the spice trade flowing
through the Red Sea.2 This struggle had ramifications as far away as Southeast Asia.
By 1511, from their base in Goa, the Portuguese captured the key port of Melaka on
the Malay Peninsula. To counter this, the Ottomans started naval expeditions into the
Indian Ocean and established new diplomatic relations with Aceh in Sumatra, sup-
porting their rivalry with Portuguese Melaka.3 The Portuguese introduced armed
trading to Asia, building a series of defensive forts along the route from India to
Southeast Asia and instituting a system of letters of marque that allowed privateering
in order to monopolize trade. Following on the heels of the Portuguese, the English
(and the Dutch) adopted their methods to greater or lesser extent, cooperating and
competing with Asians. Part of an early modern vocabulary of political power, Alexander
framed imperial contests from the Mediterranean to the archipelagic peripheries. Read
together, two fifteenth-century Alexander Romances from opposite ends of Eurasia
show how the peripheries understood and negotiated the changing conditions of early
modern trade through the figure of Alexander. Through their adaptations the peripheries
reflect on the relation of violence to peace in the encounter with others—in the Scottish
version I discuss in the next chapter, Alexander even dons the disguise of a merchant,
while the Malay version depicts Iskandar as the bringer of rational science to barbaric
races, not very different from the way Europeans used Alexander.
These two romances participate in a broad pattern of using Alexander to grapple
with contemporary geopolitics. Vincent Barletta has shown Alexander’s centrality to
Iberian literature of this period when they were expanding into Islamicate north Africa
1
Velho 1960: 40; English translation, Velho 2009: 71. Inalcık 1994: 315–63.
2
3
Özbaran 2009; Casale 2010: 57–9, 145–7; Reid 1969.
Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance.
Su Fang Ng, Oxford University Press (2019). © Su Fang Ng.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198777687.003.0003
76 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia
and Asia, while Pierre Briant examines a pan-European Enlightenment discourse

linking Alexander to the imperial projects of the eighteenth-century.4 Briant’s exegesis
reveals how intimately tied Alexander was to the creation of European “orientalism”:
in this discourse of Alexander as civilizer reviving the “immobile Orient,” the Ottoman
Empire is the modern parallel to the Achaemenid as empires in decline.5 In the earlier
turn to Alexander, precursor to Briant’s Enlightenment civilizer, the Ottoman Empire
also plays a signal part. But in the early modern period the Ottoman Empire, respected
for its military and economic might, was seen as rightful heir to Rome to triangulate
the relations of the peripheries. As I show in this book, the appropriation of Alexander
for imperial projections was not a rhetorical strategy used only by Europeans, it was
also used by Asians. In early modern encounters, the Alexander Romances of both
Britain and Southeast Asia explore foreign relations as imperial expansion.
The Alexander Romance’s translatability makes it a particularly suitable transcultural
vehicle for ideas of empire. The conjunction of religion and trade in the first recorded
Portuguese words in India—Christians and spices—reveals the interrelated obsessions
of both Europeans and Asians in early modern cross-cultural encounters, concerns
that were negotiated through the shared figure of Alexander. This chapter and the
next read Malay and Scottish Alexander romances in the context of encounter; their
meditations on kingship and on diplomatic relations show the similarities and differ-
ences of vernacularization. Both Alexanders I examine wage holy war, but one does
so as Muslim conqueror and the other as Christian crusader. Originally composed
or translated in the fifteenth century, Scottish and Malay Alexander romances were
redeployed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when cross-cultural trade relations
and religious conflict intensified.
The Alexander Romance’s transmission maps out a literary network extending from
the British Isles to Southeast Asia. The vast corpus of Alexander romances precludes
a comprehensive survey, but these two examples from the archipelagic peripheries
exemplify the farthest reaches of global literary networks. In the late sixteenth century
trade connected the peripheries at the edges of global literary networks, where
Alexander romances were inflected by cross-cultural encounters. Both their versions
of the Alexander Romance depict Alexander as an explorer coming into contact with the
world’s peoples. While the romances tend to represent alterity in crude stereotypes—
of Muslims in the English works and of Europeans in the Malay—with more extensive
contact, later works and later uses of Alexander begin to engage difference with more
specificity. Focusing on the romance in Southeast Asia, this chapter examines Alexander’s
imperial image and its uses in an Islamicate context. Probably known in Southeast
Asia by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Malay Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain
4
Barletta 2010; Briant 2017: 137–57, arguing that Montesquieu was influenced by Pierre-Daniel Huet’s
mercantilist Alexander in Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens, published in 1716 but
written in 1667 during the period of the expansion of European trade in the East Indies that I discuss.
5
Briant 2017: 306–39.
islamic alexanders in southeast asia 77
(Romance of Alexander the Two-Horned) was one of a set of Islamic romances that
came in the early period of conversion.6
If the Alexander Romance dramatizes intercultural contact, the processes of textual
transmission that brought it to Scotland and Southeast Asia demonstrate and confirm
its subject’s globalism. Both Malay and Scottish romances ultimately derive from the
sixth-century Syriac prose version of Pseudo-Callisthenes, later translated into Arabic.
Since the Syriac version’s (lost) source, a posited delta (δ) recension, is thought to be
the original text for Leo Archipresbyter’s Historia de preliis, subsequently translated
into numerous European vernaculars, it forms a bridge between western and eastern
Alexander romances. As the text spread eastward through a complex intercultural
web of transmission, it picked up diverse elements and conflicting differences from
multiple languages and cultures. By the time it reached Southeast Asia, it was in the
form of an Arabic popular epic, a sīra. Showing a variety of influences, including the
Qur’ān and Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma (Book of Kings), its manuscript attribution and
contents suggest that it was translated from the Berlin Arabic Alexander romance, Abū
Ishāq Ibrahim ibn Mufarrij al-Ṣūrī’s Sīrat al-Iskandar, though prominent elements of
Persian influence has led scholars to debate the routes of textual transmission.7
This amalgamation of Hellenic, Persian, and Arabic influences on the Malay Hikayat
Iskandar Zulkarnain was not new to Islamicate cultures, nor was the zeal for universalism
such a commixture suggests.8 There was already in early Islam, Garth Fowden suggests,
“the prospect of a universal religious, social and political identity and community,” and
even if wars and disputes over caliphal succession hindered the vision from becoming
political reality, Islam’s promise of universalism was pursued by Muslim philosophers
who sought encyclopaedic, universal knowledge in Aristotle.9 A “major and much
neglected symptom” of this desire, he contends, was pseudo-Aristotelianism, begin-
ning with the first Aristotelian translation into Arabic in the eighth century, a set of
spurious correspondence between Aristotle and Alexander that anticipated the
“universal perspective” of the immensely popular Fürstenspiegel or mirror for princes
known as Sirr al-asrār or Secret of Secrets, discussed in Chapter 4.10 Thus during the
6
Braginsky 1993a: 23. Two other important works are Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah, recounting the
story of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah and the Shīʿite uprising against the Umayyad Caliphate, and
Hikayat Amir Hamzah, the romance of the deeds of the prophet Muhammad’s uncle Amir Hamzah.
7
For influences and attribution in both Cambridge manuscripts, see Leeuwen 1937: 13–19. Some
scholars consider the work a compilation of Persian and Arabic (Brakel 1979; Winstedt 1938). Supporting
van Leeuwen’s al-Ṣūri thesis are Chambert-Loir 2006a: 371–2 (noting that Soeratno’s edition is a different
text) and 2006b: 204; and Doufikar-Aerts 2010: 270–5. Doufikar-Aerts provides fresh parallels between the
Aya Sofya 3003 manuscript of al-Ṣūri’s Sīrat al-Iskandar with van Leeuwen’s Dutch summaries. Judging by
her summary, Sīrat al-Iskandar is missing a considerable portion of the text. For an overview of the
Alexander story’s transmission into Arabic literature, see Stoneman 2003b.
8
For my earlier discussion of syncretism in Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, its incorporation of Greek
elements in the Homeric citation (noted below) and allusions to world religions, including Zoroastrianism,
Judaism, and Buddhism, see Ng 2014.
9
G. Fowden 2012: 130; see also G. Fowden 1993: 12–14.
10
G. Fowden 2012: 132, 135. For an edition of the Arabic translation of the correspondence, see
Maróth 2006; on its history, see Grignaschi 1967: 215–23; and Gutas 2009.
Umayyad caliphate there was an intermingling of cultures where “Hellenism and Iranism
appear as the natural antecedents, not the vanquished antithesis, of an Umayyad—and
increasingly Muslim—civilization.”11
Mixed Arabo-Perso-Hellenistic texts like the Alexander Romance came to Southeast
Asia through merchant networks that extended from the Red Sea to the Melakan
straits and beyond. Halfway between China and India, Southeast Asia was a convenient
meeting point. Its port cities were particularly open to outside influences—merchants,
scholars, and itinerant preachers bringing new religions. Texts were a central mode
of proselytizing. The use of narrative to teach religion dates back to antiquity: Tim
Whitmarsh notes, “The overlap between religious and narrative sensibilities explains
the attractiveness of the novel as a paradigm for communicating real theology.”12
Antique examples of the novel’s religious uses include Jewish, Christian, and Islamic
works; saturated in religious language, novels influenced popular religion.13 Since
Islamic universalism saw Alexander’s sphere of “universal political omnipotence” as
the counterpart to Aristotle’s “exceptional intellectual and spiritual authority,” it is no
surprise that the Alexander Romance would take hold in the Archipelago along with
Islam. A religiously-inflected romance like Hikayat Iskandar linked vernacular audi-
ences to a global community of co-religionists. Ronit Ricci argues, “Literary networks
connected Muslims across boundaries of space and culture, and they helped introduce
and sustain a complex web of prior texts and new interpretations that were crucial to
the establishment of both local and global Islamic identities.”14 As textual circulation
connected distant communities through translation and manuscript copying, literary
romances—especially one depicting global Islam like Hikayat Iskandar—constructed
imagined religious communities. Even if universal sovereignty is ultimately not
achievable, through Iskandar as vehicle the text promises a universal community.
Hikayat Iskandar’s recensions originate from two important early centers of Islamic
authority, Pasai and Melaka.15 Pasai, Sumatra was one of the first ports visited by Western
traders from India and the Middle East and perhaps the first city-state to convert to
Islam in the late thirteenth century. Islam began to establish itself in the late thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries in coastal ports of “north Sumatra, east Java, Champa and
the east coast of Malaya.”16 Melaka too converted at an early stage, professing Islam
by the mid-fifteenth century, though the Arab pilot Ibn Majid was scandalized by the
11
G. Fowden 2012: 136; for late Umayyad Perso-Hellenism in Syria, see G. Fowden 2004: 296–302.
12
Whitmarsh 2008a: 12. 13
Whitmarsh 2008b: 83. 14
Ricci 2011: 1–2.
15
Richard O. Winstedt supposes the two recensions arose when in 1436 the third king of Melaka,
Iskandar Shah converted after marrying a Pasai princess, who might have brought with her a copy of the
work (Winstedt 1991: 65). On the marriage and conversion, see Wolters 1970: 159–63.
16
Reid 1988–993: 2.132–3. The history of Islam’s spread to Southeast Asia is disputed, due to the paucity
of evidence, but see discussion in Ricklefs 2008: 3–16; Drewes 1968; Robson 1981. The earliest evidence is
the gravestone of Sultan Sulaiman Abdullah bin al-Basir (d. 608 ah/1211 ce) in Lamreh, Sumatra; Marco
Polo in 1292 and Ibn Baṭūṭah in 1345–6 attested to Islam in the region (Ricklefs 2008: 4). For interpretations
using epigraphical sources, see Lambourn 2003 and 2008; Kalus and Guillot 2003a and 2003b. For Islamic
trade networks, see Risso 1995.
inhabitants’ failure to adhere strictly to Islamic practices.17 A new Islamic literacy spurred
vernacular writings in Arabic script in these two regional centers.18 Both spawned
successor-kingdoms that produced court chronicles appropriating Alexander for their
genealogical fictions.
The Malay genealogical appropriation of Alexander, giving Iskandar a Persian
descent, is parallel to and influenced by a strand of Persian traditions of Alexander
as an Achaemenid. Early versions deriving from Pseudo-Callisthenes, such as the
anonymous twelfth- to fourteenth-century prose romance Iskandarnāma (The Book
of Alexander) already included the story of Alexander as son of Darab, born after
his mother who was married to the Persian king was sent back: “Alexander the
Dhul-Qarnain knew that he was King Darab’s son, for his mother had told him of his
true parentage. But he kept the truth concealed. . . . And King Alexander, who knew
that King Darab was his own brother, concealed the truth and kept it secret.”19 This
Alexander who knows the secret of his Persian lineage was incorporated in Firdawsī’s
retelling of the story. The Persianization of Alexander is not only a matter of romance.
Pierre Briant has styled the historical Alexander the “last of the Achaemenids,” argu-
ing that there were “extraordinary continuities that characterize the history of the
Near East between the conquests of Cyrus and the death of Alexander.”20 Analyzing
histories of Alexander for evidence of Iranian sources, Parivash Jamzadeh considers
Alexander’s Persianization in the romances to be the culmination of his Iranization in
the histories.21 Other scholars have traced the flows of storytelling between Greece
and Persia going in both directions, such as the considerable shared motifs between
Greek Hellenistic novels and a number of eleventh-century Persian romances.22 The
Alexander story was part of this Greco-Persian exchange. Richard Stoneman argues
that it “marks a new direction for Persian storytelling”: Achaemenid motifs influenced
Greeks in the fifth century bce, but later in the third century ce a translation move-
ment during the reign of Shapur I found “enthusiasm for Greek literature,” and so
“[w]ith this Shapurian translation movement, . . . story forms that had moved from
Persian to Greek in the fifth century bc began to move back into Persian, with the
Alexander Romance leading the charge.”23
Nonetheless, just as Persian views of Alexander were not uniform—as I discussed in
my Introduction, Zoroastrian views of Alexander were relentlessly negative—so too
Alexander’s identity was not static in Persian literature. While Firdawsī portrays
Alexander as the son of Darab, as does the Malay Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, some
17
Ahmad Ibn Majid, “Al-Mal’aqiya,” trans. in Tibbetts 1979: 99–206; cited in Reid 1988–93: 2.143.
18
For the shift to Arabic script, see Salleh 2010: 1–18.
19
Southgate 1978: 10–11; on other versions, including Firdawsī, see 169–84.
20
Briant 2002: 2. Before publishing this sweeping survey of Achaemenid history, Briant offered an
early formulation of the continuities between the Achaemenids and Hellenistic kings in an earlier article
(Briant 1982). However, it is disputed by Lane Fox 2007; Fredricksmeyer 2000 also argues that Alexander
did not assume Persian kingship.
21
Jamzadeh 2012: 181. 22
Davis 2002; see also Kingsley 1995.
23
Stoneman 2012b: 4, 11–12. For this translation movement see Bladel 2009.
later Persian works resisted this Persianization. Niẓāmī restored his Macedonian origin,
recording that Alexander’s father was Philip (Fīlqūs). Comparing four medieval Persian
epics of Alexander, Owen Cornwall suggests that while for Persian Muslims “a new
genealogy for Alexander assuaged ressentiment against the Macedonian conqueror,”
thus going “from being accursed (kujastak or gizistag) in fifth-century Pahlavi sources
to being blessed (khujasta) in tenth-century New Persian,” this genealogy was not
necessary for Niẓāmī to consider Alexander a legitimate sovereign.24 This complicated
heritage was referenced in the Malay Qur’ānic commentary, Cambridge MS Or. Ii.6.45,
Tafsīr sūrat al-Kahfi, discussed in the Introduction. The Malay Alexander Romance,
however, belongs to the tradition of Alexander’s Persianization. As is to be expected,
assimilations of the Persianized Alexander are handled quite differently in Malay
and—as I will discuss in my next chapter—in Scots. Quite opposite to the vilification of
Alexander as an intruder from the negative Persian strand, the Malay Alexander is a
most welcomed stranger. The appropriation of Alexander into Malay royal genealogies
is one important part of that assimilation. This appropriation extends to the inclusion
of the Alexander story into early Malay literature’s major chronicle, Sejarah Melayu
(Malay Annals).
The reception of the Persianized Alexander in the Malay world is best understood
if we consider the romance, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, in relation to the sixteenth-cen-
tury Sejarah Melayu. Sejarah Melayu’s paradigmatic reading of the Malay Alexander
Romance, especially Alexander’s inclusion in its royal genealogy, would be imitated
by other Malay chronicles, whether Hikayat Aceh in Sumatra or Hikayat Bandjar from
the island of Borneo.25 These texts’ differing treatments of Alexander highlight the
particular concerns the texts addressed at the time of composition. (I leave discus-
sion of Pasai’s successor Aceh’s seventeenth-century chronicle to Part II, where
I examine later contexts, focusing in this chapter on Hikayat Iskandar and Sejarah
Melayu.) In the sixteenth century, Portuguese arrival destabilized the economic and
political status quo. Trade that had been concentrated in one port, Melaka, shifted to
others, including Aceh, turning the regional economy into a polycentered system.26
The Portuguese’s dual concern with religion and trade—Christians and spices—
pitted them against the Muslim monarchs of the coastal kingdoms. These monarchs
too turned to religious rhetoric in the numerous attempts to recapture Melaka—both
by the exiled court in Johor and by Johor’s rival Aceh and others through the sixteenth
century.27 Eventually, a Johor–Dutch alliance recaptured Melaka in 1641. In the
increasingly bellicose sixteenth century, Alexander as Islamic conqueror had renewed
appeal. Hikayat Iskandar’s world conquests, I argue, offer a vision of a global Islamic
community, a fantasy of restoring the (imagined) unity broken by Portuguese, by
representing strangers as transformable through conversion into kin. Alexander is
24
Cornwall 2016: 34–5, 85. 25
Ras 1968; Chambert-Loir 2006a: 385–9. 26
P. Pinto 2012.
27
According to D. K. Bassett, “Attacks of major importance were made on Malacca by Acheh, Johore or
Japara in 1513, 1537, 1547, 1551, 1568, 1573, 1574, 1575, 1587” (Bassett 1960b: 11 n. 5).
such a preeminent stranger. By his adoption into royal genealogies, his assimilation
reconstitutes sovereignty to renew the state. However, post conquest, the exiled court
in Johor produced a chronicle, Sejarah Melayu, that redeployed him in the new context
of military conflicts with the Portuguese. Figured as very different sort of strangers, in
Sejarah Melayu the Portuguese mark the limits of conversion and kinship.
Familiar Strangers in the Peripheries

In the transmission into Malay, the Alexander Romance underwent a generic translation
to become a conversion narrative.28 In Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain Alexander’s biog-
raphy is thoroughly Islamicized with a long middle recounting episode after episode
of Iskandar’s conquest and conversion of the world (Figure 2.1). Henri Chambert-
Loir’s overview of Alexander in the Malay world notes several transformations of the
hero in this version—Iskandar’s Persian origin, his conversion to Islam, his religious
mission to convert the world, itself a civilizing project—all amounting to making
this “une épopée musulmane” (a Muslim epic).29 The Malay tradition of Alexander
paints a largely positive portrait of the conqueror. It is an extension of the propa-
ganda extolling Alexander that dates back to antiquity. A. B. Bosworth’s summary of
the idealizing portrait Plutarch paints in On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander well
describes the Malay Iskandar: “He was sent by the gods as a mediator and conciliator
for the whole world, and using force where reason was ineffective, he united all man-
kind in a single mixing jar, producing a cosmopolitan unity, in which all considered
the world their nation, Alexander’s camp their citadel, the good their kinsmen, and
the bad aliens.”30 Only Iskandar’s is a Muslim mission civilisatrice. So committed is
the Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain to this idealized vision of Alexander that, contrary to
the deadly violence of the historical Alexander’s constant warfare, it paints a benign pic-
ture of communities readily submitting to Iskandar and to Islam.31
Structured around Iskandar’s religiously motivated journeys, Hikayat Iskandar
Zulkarnain is even more profoundly marked by travel than Pseudo-Callisthenes.
Imagining the dissolution of religious and racial differences, it presents a capacious
28
Of Winstedt’s four manuscripts of the Peninsular recension in the library of the Royal Asiatic Society
in London, the most complete is Winstedt MS. IV, copied in 1906 by Ibrahim bin ʿAbbas for Wan Besar
of Kedah; it closely follows Cambridge Add. MS. 3770, dated 1808, except for an additional thirteen pages,
and is the only one known to Winstedt to complete the romance (Winstedt 1938a: 9–10). Siti Chamamah
Soeratno, who has compared and analyzed all seventeen extant manuscripts, finds University Malaya
MS. 21 in Kuala Lumpur the only complete manuscript and uses it as the base text for her edition (Hikayat
Iskandar Zulkarnain 1992); all quotations are from this edition and given parenthetically; translations are
mine. For another edition by Khalid Muhammad, see Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain 1986. For a structuralist
reading of the work, see Soeratno 1991.
29
Chambert-Loir 2006a: 372. 30
A. Bosworth 1996: 2–3.
31
Emphasizing the dark side of victories, Bosworth notes, “Massacre and enslavement was the policy
against settlements which stood siege, but Alexander viewed even refugees as insubordinate and sent his
lethal cavalry against populations which took to flight rather than submit” (A. Bosworth 1996: 28).
Figure 2.1 Opening illuminated pages of Hikayat Iskandar Dhulkarnain, copied by Enci’

Yahya bin ʿAbdulwahid anak Melaka, 1816. Farquhar MS 2, f. 1–2.
Reproduced courtesy of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
global Islamic community whose universalist empire is made possible by the convert-
ibility of pagans. This universality was not only part of Islam’s vision, it was already part
of the Greek Alexander Romance. François Polignac argues that the myth of Alexander,
developed perhaps as early as in his lifetime, but certainly widely diffused through
the Alexander Romance, was so adaptable because it presents an image of Alexander
as a universal sovereign, enabling the Macedonian model of “conquering, absolute
and charismatic monarchy” to be imitated by “not only the Ptolemaic or Seleucid
kings, . . . the Hellenized dynasts such as Mithridates, but also the Roman imperatores”
and to have “infinite capacity for mutation.”32 Cautioning against opposing history and
legend, Polignac suggests that Alexander was the first to develop his own myth and
that the spread of his legend may stem from Alexander’s own self-representation as a
man between worlds, allowing for his life to be a way to imagine the unity of history.33
The idea of universality traveled into Arabic literature. Polignac attributes prominence
of this theme of universal sovereignty in classical Arabic literature, Alexander as
cosmocrator, to two reasons: first, “the founding role of the Qur’ānic revelation” (rôle
fondateur de la revelation coranique), in which Alexander appears as Dhū’lqarnayn;
second, the historical expansion of the Arabs which “extended to the very limits of the
Polignac 1999: 3, 7, 9.
32 33
Polignac 2003.
real or imaginary empire of Alexander, from India to the Atlantic, and the debates on
the essence of power and on the rules of its devolution that that same expansion incited”
(portait jusqu’aux limites mêmes de l’empire réel ou imaginaire d’Alexandre, de l’Inde à
l’Atlantique, et les débats sur l’essence du pouvoir et sur les règles de sa devolution que cette
même expansion suscitaient).34 The arrival of Arab traders to Southeast Asian shores
further extended Alexander’s reach as they brought with them a universalist religion,
Islam, and with it the idea of Iskandar as the universal sovereign. As popular as Alexander
had been in other languages and other historical contexts, he would achieve renewed
importance in the early modern Malay world in the Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain.
An estranging experience for a Western reader, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain puts
Alexander (Iskandar) in the same genealogical line as David, Solomon, and the prophet
Muhammad. Aristotle his tutor becomes an ustaz, a religious teacher of the Qur’ān.
Importantly, Alexander is given a Persian lineage. Already known during prophet
Muhammad’s time, Alexander remains the son of Philip of Macedon in ‘Umāra’s
account (767–815), but acquired Persian paternity after the Persian Book of Kings
was introduced to Arabia around 1000 ce, influencing the Arabic Alexander story
that entered Malay.35 Hikayat Iskandar’s opening section closely follows Firdawsī’s
Iskandarnāma (Book of Alexander) from his Shāhnāma, with a tale of incest and
attempted infanticide.36 Alexander’s father Darab is born of an incestuous union, the
son of a Persian queen impregnated by her father. Abandoned by his mother to avoid
scandal so she can retain the crown, he is raised by a poor couple. Later, his display of
martial prowess proves his royal origin. Inheriting the kingdom, Darab defeats Rum
(Macedonia), and marries the king’s daughter. His love, however, turns to hate when
the princess develops bad breath and he sends her back to her father.37 In Macedonia
she discovers herself pregnant with Iskandar; meanwhile Darab’s second marriage
produces a younger son, Dara (Darius) (28). Iskandar’s secret royal Persian origin
makes him half-brother to Dara.
Iskandar’s Persian origin is a version of the secret Egyptian origin of Pseudo-
Callisthenes’ Alexander, conceived out of Olympia’s liaison with the magician
Nectanebo, who deceived her by assuming the guise of the god Ammon. Pseudo-
Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance, produced in Alexandria, Egypt, was, as François de
34
Polignac 1996: 150. This universality was so prominent, it attached also to the city of Alexandria:
Polignac 1984, 2000, 2005. In this last essay (2005), Polignac suggests that in Pseudo-Callisthenes the
founding of Alexandria replaces the oracle at Siwah of the histories as “la révélation de son avenir de
conquérant universel” (the revelation of his future as the universal conqueror, 308), and that “la fonction
de la cité est d’être la métropole de l’oikoumène” (the city’s function is to be the metropole of the oikoumene,
311), themes repeated from Aelius Aristide’s praise of Rome, suggesting a parallelism between Alexandria
and Rome: if for Polignac these texts suggest differing ways of “faire le Grec” (acting Greek, 309), British and
Malay appropriations of Alexander further indicate others. On the image of Alexander in Arabic literature,
see also Polignac 1982.
35
Leeuwen 1937: 19–21.
36
Incestuous love is a common motif in Persian romance (Grenet 2003: 37–9; and Lenfant 2009: 312–13;
both cited in Stoneman 2012b: 9). For a summary of Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, see Liaw 2013: 240–5.
37
On the motif of the bad breath, see Stoneman 2008: 25; Doufikar-Aerts 2010: 207; Manteghi 2012: 166.
Polignac shows, part of the myths generated to raise the city’s status and to position it
as an extension of the Greek world.38 By giving Alexander a royal Egyptian origin—
Nectanebo is the last pharaoh in exile—the romance appropriates Alexander’s glory
for Alexandria. Iskandar’s new origin functions similarly to extend the longevity of the
Persian empire. In the romance Iskandar becomes the last Achaemenid. Persia is his
due inheritance as the older half-brother. His mother’s fear that he would unknowingly
kill his relative turns the conflict into a fraternal war while his clemency stems from a
newly-recognized blood relation: Iskandar calls Dara “my relation” (saudara hamba, 35).
This kinship is reiterated in later episodes when he puts Dara’s son Darinus on the
throne of Ajam (Syria), calling him “my relative’s son” (anak saudaraku, 196). This descent
posits an unexpected affinity between Macedonian Iskandar and Persia. In making
war on a Persia he is meant to inherit, Iskandar’s relation to empire is doubled: he is
both insider and outsider.
Rather than a clash of cultures, Hikayat Iskandar presents empire as inherited
and religion as a voluntary choice. The Persian conquest is part of a larger narrative of
Islamicization that starts with Iskandar himself. Growing proud from his conquests,
Iskandar—whose Persian relatives are fire-worshipping Zoroastrians (Majusi) but
Roman family are Muslims—must be reconverted. The agent of his reconversion is the
prophet Khidir or, in Arabic, al-Khiḍ r (the green one).39 A character from popular
Islamic tradition, al-Khiḍ r is linked in commentaries to the unnamed figure in Sūra 18
(Sūra of the Kahf, or Cave) of the Qur’ān who shows Moses how God’s benevolence
exceeds human reason. Al-Khiḍ r’s most striking characteristic, his immortality, ties
his legend to Alexander’s: both feature the quest for the water of life, which Alexander
fails to achieve but al-Khiḍ r obtains.40 Like Alexander, al-Khiḍ r is a boundary-crossing,
culturally hybrid figure, often conflated both with Saint George and with Elijah.41
Functioning as a second protagonist, Khidir is Iskandar’s advance guard, persuading
the people to submit to Islam before, and often without, military intervention. That the
proud, Persianized Iskandar is Khidir’s first major convert is significant: one is not
born a Muslim but chooses to become one. Iskandar undergoes the same process of
conversion as the peoples he converts.
Perhaps a symbolic purgation of his non-Islamic Persian heritage, reconversion
underlines the religious character of Iskandar’s imperial expansion. Foretold as the
inheritor of Solomon (Sulaiman), Iskandar will unite the world—“raja akan mengim-
punkan kerajaan masyrik dan magrib, laut dan darat” (the king who will gather
38
Polignac 2000; Brown and Taieb 1996.
39
The spelling of his name varies; Soeratno’s edition most usually transliterates it as Khidlir but sometimes
also Khidhir. For consistency, I spell his name Khidir.
40
Friedländer 1913. The ninth-century historian al-Tabarī also surveys the tradition (al-Tabarī 1991:
3.1–18). For modern studies, see Franke 2000; Hasluck 1932: 1.319–36; and Omar 1993: 279–94. See also
Ng and Hodges 2010.
41
Wolper 2000; E. Fowden 2002; and Hasluck 1932: 1.326–7, 320–36.
together kingdoms of east and west, sea and land, 42).42 His God-given title Zulkarnain
signifies his glorifying the earth, both East and West (bumi masyrik dan magrib, 42).
Prominent in Hikayat Iskandar, the theme of the unification of East and West—and
the specific language of the Arabic phrase, masyrik wa magrib—was employed by early
modern Malay kings projecting a royal imperial image.
Iskandar’s encounter with alien peoples and marvels reveals not absolute difference
but the potential for transformation. Episodes of encounter are too numerous to
examine in detail, but they follow a general pattern: Iskandar encounters a tribe of
idol-worshippers; the demonic origin of the idol’s power is exposed and expelled by
the prophet Khidir; and the people, instructed in the truth, are duly converted. Thus
the Sabian worshippers of Saturn, who also appear in the Qur’ān, initially portrayed as
wild animals without language, become convertible to Islam (chapter 9, 137–41). They
are civilized by being given a change of clothing (persalin, 138)—a transnational prac-
tice of investiture, the giving of robes of honor incorporates outsiders into a commu-
nity.43 Adopting the Sabians as kin (diambilkan saudaranya, 140), Iskandar learns
about God’s greatness from marvels.44 No matter how alien, conversion turns unlike-
ness into likeness, an attitude extended even to the non-human world, including
automata, animals, and spirit beings.45 Just as Iskandar is kin to the Persian kings, so
too the world is his kin in a common religion.
Conversion to Islam requires only the shahādah (‫)شهادة‬, the proclamation of faith,
which Khidir teaches new converts. A simple speech-act turns foes into friends,
strangers into kin. Iskandar’s conquests often boil down to this single sentence. His
tongue mightier than Iskandar’s sword, Khidir’s polylingual gift easily sets the multi-
lingual confusion of the world to order. Speaking the local vernacular everywhere they
go, Khidir knows all the world’s languages: “Tuanku yang memberi tahu aku segala
bahasa makhluk. Tiada jua suatu kaum di dalam dunia ini melainkan dapat aku
berkata-kata dengan bahasa itu” (It is the Lord [God] who conveyed to me all human
language. There is no tribe in the world but that I can speak with them, 61). Khidir’s
polyglottism, a testament to Islam’s truth, makes him local and global. But linguistic
exchange also goes the other way. Arabic’s incorporation, particularly phrases from
the Qur’ān, teaches vernacular audiences the holy language. Recounting the story of
Babel, Hikayat Iskandar makes language freighted, signifying humanness and mem-
bership in Islam, as Iskandar’s conquests heal Babel’s linguistic breaches to knit the
world into one community.
This universalism is expressed in a narrative pattern whereby Iskandar discovers in
the peripheries peoples who share his religion: in a kind of discovery of the self, where
we would expect strangeness he finds kinship. Initially, the West is a romance space of
42
The legend of Gog and Magog comes from Syriac apocalyptic works: Nöldeke 1890: 32; Anderson 1932.
For the texts, see A. Palmer 1993, which includes Two Seventh-century Syriac Apocalyptic Texts with an
introduction, translation, and annotation by S. Brock with added annotation and a historical introduction
by Robert Hoyland.
43
Gordon 2001. 44
See Ng 2016. 45
For further discussion see Ng 2016: 110–13.
marvels. Iskandar encounters ever more marvels the further he goes. Yet he discovers
commonalities with strangers. At the world’s ends, racial otherness is linked to reli-
gious sameness. In Andalus (Andalusia), they are already Muslims, following the
religion of the prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) (52). A common religion means kinship:
Andalus’s king, addressed by Iskandar as brother, equates community and religion:
“Dan adalah ia satu agama dengan kita. Maka satu kaum kita dengan dia” (He is of one
religion with us, and thus we are of one race with him, 54). These elements are repeated
in another Western encounter: a queen ruling a Saturn-worshipping tribe is secretly
Muslim and expecting Iskandar’s arrival: “Maka selamanya aku menantikan Raja
Iskandar juga supaya lahirlah Islamku” (Long I have waited for King Alexander so that
my Islam can be revealed, 87). Muslim rule in the southern Iberian Peninsula lasted
from c.711 with the initial Umayyad invasions until the Reconquista expelled the last
Muslims in 1492. Hikayat Iskandar was probably translated in that period. The kinship
forged by Iskandar with stranger Muslims models one kind of cross-cultural relations
based on a shared religion. The romance offers Muslim readers in Southeast Asia a
sense of unity, framed in the language of kinship, with brother Muslims as far away as
southern Europe. In a moment of radical familiarity, Iskandar can speak directly to the
Andalusians because they know the Roman (Latin) language (bahasa Rum, 59).
Similarly, in the East on his way to China, Iskandar meets an Arabic-speaking tribe
professing an Abrahamic religion. Having no king, they are led by elders functioning
as judges. Their version of the shahādah conforms to the first part of the Islamic creed,
but the second part substitutes Abraham for Muhammad: “La ilaha illa ʾl-lah, Ibrahima
khalilullah” (There is no God but God [Allah], Abraham is a friend of Allah, 457).
Resembling the Israelites of the Book of Judges, with a non-monarchical political
structure, they are accepted as Muslim. Iskandar more thoroughly Islamicizes the
country when he rids them of a tyrannical female monarch who killed their former
king, thus restoring them to a monarchy. While female tyrants are the stuff of romance,
details about China indicate more intimate knowledge that Southeast Asians might
have as southern neighbours: a memory of the voyages of the Yuan treasure fleets led
by Admiral Zheng He (1371–1433) to the Indian Ocean is preserved in the account of
the tyrant queen’s armada of a thousand ships sent to countries bordering the great
ocean.46 The historical Zheng He, who sailed as far as east Africa, was Muslim, and
perhaps part of the spread of Islam to Southeast Asia.
Even Herodotean or Plinian marvels, beings who resemble dogs or headless men
with eyes in their breasts, are humanized and Islamicized (134, 501).47 The one-eyed
46
For Zheng He, see Louis Levathes 1997: 61–3. For a comparison of Hikayat Iskandar to Luis Camões’s
Lusíadas and a 1597 Chinese novel about Zheng He’s voyages, Luo Maoden’s Sanbao taijian xia Xiyangji ji
tongsu yanyi [Popular Romance of the Record of the Three-Jeweled Eunuch Descending upon the Western
Sea], see Lombard 1993.
47
Herodotus describes Libya as a wild place inhabited by, among others, “the dog-headed men and the
headless that have their eyes in their breasts, as the Libyans say, and the wild men and women, besides
many other creatures not fabulous” (Herodotus 1920–25: 2.395, book 4.191). In his description of Ethiopia
in Natural History, Pliny the Elder includes this list: “towards the west are the Nigroi, whose king is said to
men and dog-like women, also ruled by judges and professing Abraham’s religion, are
accepted as Muslim (di dalam agama Islam, 135). Khidir assures Iskandar that God’s
power creates the world’s diversity: “ . . . setengah makhluk Allah tiada bermata, dan
setengah hitam, dan setengah putih, dan kecil, dan setengah besar panjang. Maka
sekaliannya daripada Nabi Adam juga” (. . . half of God’s creatures lack eyes, half are
black and half white, and small, and some tall and long. But they all come from Prophet
Adam, 136). While marvels are often objectified, Hikayat Iskandar’s conversion struc-
ture gives them agency and subjectivity. Iskandar’s anthropological curiosity evokes
their fear, and they pray for God’s protection. To the conquered, Iskandar is the strange
marvel. Offering a perspective from the other side, Hikayat Iskandar turns conversion
into a discovery of the self in the stranger. In the peripheries, where marvels most
abound, conversion becomes unnecessary as Iskandar finds co-religionists abroad.
The potential scene of conversion by the sword turns into a fantasy of religious reci-
procity with racial others.
Marvelous Technology
In Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain a religious empire is gained by technology. Rather
than opposites, science advances religion. The fascination with technological marvels
is a significant thread in connected literary histories: Eastern narratives of exploration
parallel Western ones. Exploration was not only a feature of European early modernity
but also an aspect of Malay texts. The religious pilgrimage, or hajj, connected Southeast
Asia to the Middle East, and that link is incorporated in early modern Malay texts’
citation of holy cities in Arabia, as I discuss further in Chapter 10.48 In Hikayat Iskandar
Zulkarnain Iskandar’s travels is intertwined with his use of technological marvels. The
work belongs to the later tradition that amplified the strand of technological marvels
in the Alexander Romance—the diving bell and flying machine for exploration—to
imagine the conqueror as explorer and technocrat. Although not part of the original
narrative and only later attached to the Romance in European, Arabic, and Persian
traditions, Alexander’s diving bell and flying machine became iconic, recasting the
have only one eye, in his forehead; the Wild-beast-eaters, who live chiefly on the flesh of panthers and lions;
the Eatalls, who devour everything; the Man-eaters, whose diet is human flesh (Anthropophagi humana
carne vescentes); the Dog-milkers, who have dogs’ heads (Cynamolgi caninis capitibus); the Artabatitae,
who have four legs and rove about like wild animals; and then the Hesperioi, the Perorsi and the people we
have mentioned as inhabiting the border of Mauretania” (Pliny 1938–63: 482–3, book 6.35.195). Plinian
monsters were popular in Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: images of Anthropophagi
(cannibals), Cenocephali (dog-men), and others circulated in works like the print edition of Hartmann
Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) and, especially popular in the early modern period, Ambroise Paré’s
Des Monstres et prodigies (Paré [1575] 1982). Earlier, Ctesias described India as a place of marvels, including
dog-headed men and others: for the reception of Greek account of marvels in India, see Wittkower 1942.
48
Tagliacozzo 2013, esp. chapter 4, “Sultanate and Crescent: Religion and Politics in the Indian Ocean,”
83–106.
conqueror into an “inventor and sage.”49 Episodes of technological marvels preserve

memory of Arab assimilation of Greek science. War machines that proliferate in the
romance embody Iskandar’s scientific modernity that gains him an empire. This dom-
inant strand in the romance justifies empire.
Alexander’s conquest of India inaugurates an ethnographic tradition in Ctesias’
Indika and the fictional letters to Aristotle describing India.50 In Hikayat Iskandar,
the elephant is emblematic of this encounter, but rather than celebrating nature’s
wonders, the work offers a technological counter to the Indian marvel. Iskandar’s
battle with the Indian pachydermic army is one of the few instances when he is
defeated, but he counterattacks by deploying hollow idols of copper and iron filled
with fire to burn the elephants’ trunks and tusks and to disperse them (393–4).
Elephants are symbolic of Persian power: their 400 war elephants are accustomed to
fighting in India (empat ratus gajah biasa perang . . . di negeri Hindi dan Sindi, 286),
and Rustam, ruler of a Persian tributary, is compared to a wild elephant (gajah meta,
282). With elephant-shaped automatons of copper (gajah tembaga, 296) routing the
Persian army, Iskandar’s machines mimic his opponents’ pachydermic forces to sur-
pass them. Indian natural fecundity produces an awesome war animal, but Iskandar’s
technology proves superior. For the early modern West, the elephant symbolized the
wonders of the East—Manuel I celebrated Portuguese conquest of Melaka by sending
Pope Leo X Hanno the elephant. In Hikayat Iskandar’s complex representation, the
Asian animal is celebrated but so is new technology, an interest evinced by Southeast
Asian rulers through the period in their efforts to purchase cannon and gunmaking
technology from the Ottoman Empire.51
Automatons are also an important part of Iskandar’s arsenal in the militarization
of the cities he founds. The several Alexandrias showcase his use of technological
marvels. In one, Iskandar builds a walled city of copper with towers guarded
by automatons:
Dan kita perbuat di atas kota-kota itu patung daripada tembaga berkeliling kota itu. Dan pada
tangannya seorang sebilah pedang. Setengah memegang panah dan setengah memegang tom-
bak. Maka apabila datang seteru kita, maka sekalian patung itu bergerak, seperti manusia. Dan
49
Stoneman 2008: 107–27. Richard Stoneman notes that the story of Alexander’s diving-bell submarine
“is not part of the original narrative of A and beta, nor is it in the derivatives of A such as the Syriac trans-
lation and Julius Valerius, nor yet in epsilon, which was a source for much that is in gamma” (Stoneman 2008:
112). Both Alexander’s diving bell and flying machine seem to originate in the Talmud, where they follow
one another (Stoneman 2008: 111–19). There were earlier Sumerian and Babylonian analogues of the fly-
ing king; in Firdawsī’s Shahnāma, it is Kay Kāvus who flies, while in Amīr Khusraw’s Āyina-yi Iskandarī
(Mirror for Iskandar), after exploring the ocean’s bottom in a glass box Iskandar is frightened to death by a
sea monster (Melville 2012: 406, 407); see also Schmidt 1995.
50
Originally an epistolary novel accreted into the Greek Alexander Romance, the letters were translated
into Latin as Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem in the second and third century ce and thence into the
vernacular (Merkelbach 1977: 56 n. 32; Gunderson 1980: 86–8; B. Berg 1973: 382). For translations of
Greek and Latin texts and their influence on English literature, see Stoneman 2012c.
51
See my Chapter 8 on Aceh. The Portuguese found a large armament of guns and powder stockpiled in
Melaka by its Malay rulers.
kamu adakan pintu kota itu empat puluh pintu. Maka tiap-tiap pintu itu kamu adakan kuda
daripada tembaga. Dan atasnya seorang patung memegang pedang. . . . Apabila datang orang
hampir kepadanya, maka bergeraklah ia memarang ke kiri dan ke kanan, dan ke belakang, dan
ke hadapan. (618)
[We build on the towers statues of copper surrounding the city. In the hand of each statue is a
sword. Some hold arrows and some spears. When our enemies come, all the statues will move
like humans. The city will have forty gates. At each gate we affix a copper horse, on which rides
a statue holding a sword. . . . When anyone approaches, the statue goes into action, cleaving to
the left and to the right, behind and in front.]
The earlier mechanization of war with the use of metal elephants is transferred to the
city. These episodes allude to Arab assimilation of Greek science. Automata, so promi-
nent in Hikayat Iskandar, were part of Hellenistic mechanical engineering, celebrated
in their literature and in later Islamic scientific works. The moving statues are reminis-
cent of the third century bce Ktesibios of Alexandria’s hydraulic clocks with moving
figures, including one with a rod pointing the time; Ktesibios’ clock may explain the
mosaic of Qasr el-Lebya showing the figure of Helios on the Pharos pointing with a
sword at what might be a sundial, suggesting a representation of an automaton.52
Other traces of Greek science appear in episodes involving military uses of the
speculum. In one, it is an instrument of surveillance, much like Nectanebo’s magic mir-
ror of the Alexander Romance but built into an anthropomorphic tower. This tower,
with the form of a human (rupa manusia) and movement of one (gerak manusia, 616),
is yet another automaton. At its top is a cupola with a shrine whose walls are a mirror
(cermin) made by a wise man (hakim) named Farbulis (616). The mirror is an unusual
global positioning system in which Iskandar can observe far-off countries and track
ships, whether foreign visitors or those he sends abroad on diplomatic missions (617).
This tower is reminiscent of Pharos, the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria during the
Ptolemaic Kingdom that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Indeed,
medieval Arab travelers who describe Pharos call it manāra, the same word used in
Hikayat Iskandar.53 Abū al-Ḥ asan ʿAlī Ibn al-Ḥ usayn al-Masʿūdī (d. c.956–7)’s encyclo-
paedic history, Murūj al-dhahab wa maʿādin al-jawahir (The Meadows of Gold and
Mines of Gem), discusses not only Alexander’s life and deeds but also the lighthouse
52
Fragaki 2012: 229–50. Ktesibios invented a hydraulic organ using water pressure to make mechanical
birds sing (described in Vitruvius 1956–62: 2.310–13, book 10.7); and Byzantium had automata in the
form of golden trees with mechanical singing birds: see Brett 1954; Trilling 1997; and Paipetis 2008. During
the cAbbasid Caliphate, at the Baghdad House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), three Persian brothers,
Muḥammad, Aḥmad, and Ḥ asan bin Mūsā ibn Shākir, published Kitab al-Ḥ iyal (The Book of Ingenious
Devices) describing machines, including automata (Banū Mūsā 1979).
53
Arab descriptions include those by Ibn Rusta (903), al-Idrisi (1115), al-Balawi (1166), Ibn Jubayr
(1183), and al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) (Hamarneh 1971). For its strategic importance, see descriptions by
Caesar 2016: 350–5, book 3.111–12, and Josephus 1961: 2.178–83, book 4.605–15. For an Arabic descrip-
tion, see Levi-Provençal 1940. For Arabic accounts see also Thiersch 1909; Palacios 1933; Polignac 1984;
and Doufikar-Aerts 1996. Arabic magic mirrors may have influenced the European literature through the
Alexander Romance, first appearing in Prester John’s Letter, a popular medieval work (Slessarev 1959:
49–51).
and mirror at Alexandria, while in the Persian tradition Niz.āmī attributes to Alexander
the Great the mirror’s invention.54 These traditions traveled as far as China—in 1225
one Chinese author wrote that “At the summit [of the Pharos of Alexandria] there was
an immense mirror, and if warships of other countries tried to make an attack, the
mirror detected them beforehand, and the troops were ready to repel it”; versions were
current in Europe as late as 1589—Neapolitan Giambattista della Porta wrote of how
“King Ptolemy built a tower in the Pharos in which he placed a mirror, such that he was
able to see from a distance of six hundred miles the enemy ships that were invading
and plundering his territory.”55 Although in della Porta the surveillance mirror func-
tioned more like a telescope, these traditions emphasize the scientific advancement of
Alexandria and of its founder Alexander. In the Malay Alexander Romance, the mirror,
offering an all-encompassing vision, is both tool and symbol of universal kingship.
In another episode revealing Greek influence (filtered through the Arabs), the mir-
ror becomes a powerful weapon. In one war, Iskandar affixes a mirror to a tall post like
a ship’s mast to burn the city’s gates (496). Given the adjective of “wisdom” (cermin
hikmat, 497), the mirror reflects light to heat everything before it, forcing a surrender:
“Maka buruj tembaga dan segala baju pada segala tubuh manusia itu pun hanguslah
daripada kehangatan cermin itu, selaku terbakarlah muka Raja Manyamaj pun” (Then
the copper fortresses and all the clothes on every person are burnt from the heat of the
mirror, as was the face of King Manyamaj, 497). This episode recalls Archimedes, said
to have used mirrors to burn Roman warships attacking Syracuse. While none of the
major accounts of the siege of Syracuse in the Second Punic War mention burning
mirrors—though Polybius, Livy, and Plutarch all describe the devastating power
of Archimedes’ machines—the late second century Lucian says that Archimedes
“burned the ships (triremes) of the enemy by means of his science” while Galen sug-
gests that he “is said to have set on fire the enemy’s triremes by means of pyreia,” usually
translated as flammable materials but also interpreted as burning mirrors.56 Whether
or not Archimedes used burning mirrors against the Romans—and skeptics include
René Descartes—the idea circulated through the work of Diocles (c.240–180 bce),
whose treatise, On burning mirrors, was preserved in Arabic translations and study of
optics, and as Hikayat Iskandar shows, circulated in romances.57 In the late sixteenth
54
Masʿūdī 1821–89: 2.432–5; Niẓāmī 1881: canto 23. For discussion of Pharos and Masʿūdī, see
Stoneman 2008: 62–6; Zuwiyya 2011a: 90–1; Yamanaka 2012: 269–70. For Alexandria’s identification with
marvels, especially Pharos, see Polignac 1984.
55
Quoted in Needham 1978–95: 3.241; for the Islamic Alexander in China, see Yamanaka 2012; della
Porta’s 1589 Natural Magic is quoted in Reeves 2008: 72; for the English translation see Porta 1658.
56
Simms 1977: 6; Lucian 1913: 1.37; Galen 1969: 93, book 3.2; both quoted in Simms 1977: 5, his
translation.
57
For an edition, based on a 15th-century Arabic manuscript, MS 392–3, Shrine Library, Meshhed, Iran, see
Toomer 1976. Roshdi Rashed’s discovery of a ninth-century manuscript of an Arabic translation of a Greek text
on burning mirrors at the Tareq Rajab Museum, Haweli, Kuwait, is noted by Valiullin and Tarabarin 2010: 390.
In the eleventh-century Book of Optics (Kitāb al-Manāzir) Ibn al-Haytham also considers burning spheres: see
Rashed 1990; and Rashed 1993. Knowledge of Diocles was available in early modern Europe through the
tenth-century mathematician Eutychios of Alexandria (Sa’ïd Ibn Baţriq)’s summary.
century, burning mirrors gained renewed scientific attention in Europe; they were
mentioned in a couple of plays by Ben Jonson, whose friend William Drummond was
experimenting with them.58
Hikayat Iskandar shows marked influence of Arabic science. Arabic astronomy may
explain its (imprecise) translation of the Scylla and Charybdis episode from Homer’s
Odyssey. As in Homer, Iskandar is sailing in treacherous waters and must chart a care-
ful course between two snares, on the one side rocks (batu) threatening shipwreck and
on the other boiling sea water (air laut mendidih, 452). Although these dangers do not
replicate Homer exactly—the Odyssean dangers are dangerous rocks and a whirlpool—
the resemblance is stronger than first appears. An Arabic name for the star cluster
Hyades is al-Ḳallāṣ, meaning “the Boiling Sea,” derived from ‫( قلس‬qalasa), meaning
“to belch, burp, eruct.”59 The phrase “boiling waters” thus describes a whirlpool’s state
of swirling agitation. In the romance the idea of churning waters is mistranslated as
burning temperatures. Although Pseudo-Callisthenes quotes Homer, this particular
episode is found neither in the Greek Alexander Romance nor in Archpriest Leo’s
Historia de preliis. The Homeric element thus derives from other, likely Arabic, sources.60
Science and technology in Hikayat Iskandar serve empire. Familiar episodes from
Pseudo-Callisthenes, such as Alexander’s diving bell and his wall for confining Gog
and Magog, are turned into technologically-driven justifications of empire. Iskandar’s
exploration of the ocean, conflated with the story of the Old Testament Jonah, gains
divine approval. His diving bell, swallowed by an enormous fish whose skin God turns
to crystal to allow an unimpeded view, takes him to the ends of the world, where his
declaration as world emperor, ruler from East to West (dari masyrik ke maghrib, 553),
is endorsed by a divine voice giving him permission to go where he will. Similarly, the
episode of the walling in of the barbaric tribes of Gog and Magog legitimizes Iskandar’s
conquest. Alexander’s confinement of Gog and Magog, monstrous races who are also
mentioned in the Old Testament Ezekiel 38–9, is a Jewish legend that entered the
Qur’ān.61 Hikayat Iskandar associates Gog and Magog whose Arabic names are Yajuj
wa Majuj, created from Adam’s semen and Eve’s menstrual blood, with fallen human
58
Donaldson 2011: 396.
59
Richard Hinkley Allen suggests that the name al-Ḳallās is “continuing in Arabia the Greek and
Roman ideas of its stormy and watery character” (Allen 1963: 389). Incidentally, Homer mentions Hyades
in his description of the shield of Achilles (Homer 1960–3: 324–5, book 18.486). See entry for ‫( قلس‬qalasa)
in Cowan 1994.
60
On knowledge of Homer in medieval Arabic, see Kraemer 1956 and Kraemer 1957; Strohmaier 1980
and Strohmaier 1983. Gustave E. von Grunebaum suggests a line of transmission through Theophilus of
Edessa (d. 785), who translated parts of Homer into Syriac at the court of the caliph al-Mahdī (775–85)
(303); he also argues for parallels between parts of the Arabian Nights, in particular the “Sindbad” episodes,
and Greek literature (chapter 9, “Creative borrowing: Greece in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ ” in Grunebaum 1953:
294–319). However, Muhsin Mahdi shows that the eighteenth-century French translator, Antoine Galland,
interpolated “Sindbad” and the story “Qamarazzaman” (which resembles Plautine comedy) into his man-
uscript of “Alf Layla wa Layla” (Mahdi 1994: 17–20, 27–34). Some stories may have circulated as folk tales.
I discuss this episode in Ng 2014.
61
Sura 18.86–97; Pfister 1930. Anderson objects to Pfister’s early dating of the legend (Anderson 1932:
20 n.1). See discussion in Bøe 2001: 223–4.
sexuality. They threaten civilization in their genocidal desire to destroy the whole
world and wipe out other tribes (membinasakan segala isi dunia ini daripada kaum
yang lain, 546). Interestingly, their description—they use one oversized ear as a sleep-
ing mat and the other as a blanket—recalls the Plinian races, popular also in early
modern Europe. In his Natural History Pliny the Elder describes the Panotioi in
Scythia on “the All-ears Islands in which the natives have very large ears covering the
whole of their bodies, which are otherwise left naked” (Panotiorum aliae in quibus
nuda alioqui corpora praegrandes ipsorum aures tota contegant).62 The Panotioi are
another of the Plinian marvels that circulated both in Europe and, through Hikayat
Iskandar, in Southeast Asia.63 Hikayat Iskandar conflates the Panotioi with the bar-
baric tribes of Gog and Magog. Using metallurgy to build a wall and gate of iron and
steel to enclose them, Iskandar harnesses science and technology to save the world’s
(ethnic) diversity.
Hikayat Iskandar’s endorsement of imperial conquest is made explicit in the
encounter with the naked gymnosophists. In Pseudo-Callisthenes, the gymnoso-
phists’ simplicity contrasts with Alexander’s ambition. In Hikayat Iskandar, these
pacifists without possessions are subjected to Iskandar’s criticism. Initially, they appear
as ethical barbarians criticizing Alexander: they point out that he gains nothing from
conquering them since they own nothing but the science of wisdom (410). As in
Pseudo-Callisthenes, Iskandar cannot give them the eternal life they ask for, where-
upon they challenge him, “Jikalau ada demikian katamu, mengapa engkau pergi
perang ke sana kemari” (If this is so as you say, why do you war hither and thither?
411). But the episode concludes with Iskandar giving a long justification of his actions
as commanded by God (takdir Tuhan, 411). The criticism of Alexander is muted by his
claim to be a divine instrument. While Iskandar as an individual may need his pride
checked, imperial conquest, tied to religious conversion, is largely celebrated. Only at
the end is Iskandar’s imperial ambition questioned.
Pirate and Emperor

While predominantly a celebration of empire, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain does offer
some moral critiques of it. In particular, Iskandar’s character is tested when he is
stripped of the trappings of kingship. This situation was of special concern to the exiled
Melakan court—the junior branch turned into the new Johor Riau-Lingga sultanate—
that had several removals in the course of the century after Portuguese conquest.
Taking two key episodes from Pseudo-Callisthenes—Alexander’s characterization as a
thief by Darius and his search for the water of life—Hikayat Iskandar poses the ques-
tion of what it means to be a king without a kingdom, an emperor without an empire.
Pliny 1938–63: 2.192–3, book 4.13.94–5.

62
This is also among woodcut images from the Nuremberg Chronicle.

63
The first example is an episode from Pseudo-Callisthenes’ epistolary debate in

which the upstart Alexander, characterized as a bandit or pirate, triumphs over Darius
the emperor. Alexander is morally superior despite his lack of an empire. In Pseudo-
Callisthenes, Darius sends the insulting gifts of a whip and a ball to insinuate that
Alexander is still a boy and threatens to crucify him as an arch-robber (ἀρχιλῃστὴς)
(I:36, 45).64 Reinterpreting the insolent gifts, Alexander declares he will flay his
enemies with the whip and he will conquer the world, symbolized by the ball:
ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν ἐάν σε ἡττήσω, περίφημος ἔσομαι καὶ μέγας βασιλεὺς παρὰ βαρβάροις καὶ Ἓλλησιν,
ὃτι τὸν τηλικοῦτον βασιλέα Περσῶν Δαρεῖον ἀνεῖλον. σὺ δ᾽ ἐμὲ ἐὰν ἡττήσῃς, οὐδὲν ἔπραξας
γενναῖον, λῃστὴν ἡττήσας καθώς μοι ἒγραψας σύ, ἐγὼ δὲ βασιλέα Δαρεῖον. (I:38, 43)
[Now if I defeat you, I shall be famous and a great king among the barbarians and the Hellenes,
because I overthrew such a great king of the Persians, Darius. But if you defeat me, you have
done no great deed: you have defeated a bandit as you called me, but I have defeated you, King
Darius.] (I:38, 47)
Hikayat Iskandar rehearses the same exchange: having been sent sesame seeds repre-
senting countless Persian troops, Iskandar contemptuously chews them up to symbol-
ize how he will treat them. In return Iskandar sends mustard seeds, making Darinus
tear up and unable to swallow the seeds. Iskandar’s message to Darinus is this:
Dan jikalau aku dianugerahakan Allah Subhanahu Wa Taala membunuh engkau, tiada dapat
tiada dekat orang yang membunuh Raja Darinus yang amat gagah dengan kebesarannya,
seorang bukan daripada asal raja daripada hulubalang jua membunuh dia. Dan jikalau diberi
Allah taala membunuh aku, niscaya dikata orang bahwa Raja Darinus raja besar lagi amat
gagah dibunuhnya itu seorang daripada pencuri bukan daripada raja dan hulubalang yang
dibunuhnya itu. (321–2)
[If God the Glorious and Great grants that I kill you, [it would be said that] the one killing King
Darinus the most mighty cannot compare in his greatness, but is rather one not from a royal
or warrior line. And if God the Great lets you kill me, then it would be said that King Darinus,
the great and most mighty king, is killed by a thief rather than one from the lineage of kings
and warriors.]
Just as Pseudo-Callisthenes repeats the term λῃστής in the contest of words, Hikayat
Iskandar repeats the word pencuri (thief). The Persians and their allies turn frequently
to terms of abuse characterizing Iskandar as a contemptible person (seorang yang hina,
335) and a robber king (raja penyamun, 338). After Darinus’s defeat, the remaining
Persian kings dismiss Iskandar as common: “Raja Iskandar itu bukannya asal raja yang
turun-temurun, melainkan adalah ia seorang Khari yang penyamun” (King Alexander
does not descend from the line of kings, but instead he is a dishonorable robber, 346).65
64
Quotations from Pseudo-Callisthenes are from Kroll 1958 and translations of Kroll from Haight 1955,
though Jouanno 2002: 13 considers Kroll’s text problematically corrupt; citations are given parenthetically
by book and section number followed by page number. I also reference translations from Stoneman 1991.
65
The word Khari may be a scribal error for the Arabic word ‫خزي‬, which differs only by one dot, ‫ ز‬instead
of ‫ر‬, meaning “disgrace, discredit, dishonor” (see entry in Baalbaki 2007).
In India, accused of stealing Darinus’s wife and children by deception (tipu, 376),
Iskandar is called a common thief: “raja yang aniaya, penyamun, lagi kurang
bangsanya” (a king who is a traitor, a robber, and ignoble, 376). Despite all the abuse,
in both texts the so-called bandit wins the moral argument. With nothing to lose,
the outlaw proves himself by defeating an emperor.
This episode in Hikayat Iskandar, depicting Iskandar as the ultimate outsider, stands
somewhat at odds with the earlier representation of him as the true heir of empire.
Criticism of Alexander’s piracy was already present in earlier histories, but Hikayat
Iskandar follows Pseudo-Callisthenes in giving it a positive valence. The Latin account
by a rhetorician and politician who ended his career as proconsul of Africa when he
died in 53 ce, Quintus Curtius’ Historiarum Alexandri Magni Macedonis (History of
Alexander the Great of Macedon), puts it in the mouth of the Scythians, represented as
“virtuous barbarians,” who say to Alexander, “At tu, qui te gloriaris ad latrones perse-
quendos venire, omnium gentium quas adisti latro es” (But you, who boast that you are
coming to attack robbers, are the robber of all the nations to which you have come).66
The Loeb translator, John Rolfe, notes the similarity of the Scythians’ speech to the
pirate’s reply to Alexander in Cicero’s De re publica and Augustine’s De civitate Dei. We
only have a fragment from Cicero, without Alexander’s name attached:
. . . nam cum quaereretur ex eo, quo scelere impulsus mare haberet infestum uno myoparone,
“Eodem,” inquit, “quo tu orbem terrae.” . . .
[. . . for when he was asked what wickedness drove him to harass the sea with his one pirate
galley, he replied: “The same wickedness that drives you to harass the whole world.”]67
Cicero was likely Augustine’s source for a strikingly similar anecdote about Alexander
the Great, in which the pirate turns the term latro (pirate) against Alexander, imperator
(emperor).68 Although the language is similar, Cicero and Augustine’s characterization
of Alexander as pirate is more negative than Curtius’. Their Alexander is a bandit writ
large; Curtius’ Alexander prudently takes the Scythians’ advice. Pseudo-Callisthenes
and Hikayat Iskandar reverse the criticism of Alexander as a plundering imperialist.
Instead, Darius is a tyrant pusillaminously punching below his weight, and Alexander
the upstart challenging a great empire.
The second example, Alexander’s search for the water of life, offers a much darker
portrait of him. Rejecting counsel, Iskandar leaves his followers behind to pursue
66
Curtius 1985: 2.202–3, book VII.viii.19. For Curtius’ identity and dates, see Waldemar Heckel’s intro-
duction in Curtius 1984: 1–4; and the overview of sources in Heckel and Yardley 2004: xx–xxiii. For Curtius’
representation of Scythians, see Baynham 1998: 87–9. Noting that Curtius’ literary models included Livy and
Herodotus, Heckel suggests that he “writes as a rhetorician, sensational and emotive” with a “fondness for the
remote and the exotic,” using the character-sketch, speeches, and moralizing to offer a balanced portrait:
“Curtius judges Alexander favourably without attempting to white-wash him” (“Introduction” in Curtius 1984:
10, 13). For Curtius’ use of literary tropes see Heckel 2015 and Maitland 2015.
67
Cicero 1977: 212–13, book III.24. Lost until 1820, only fragments of a quarter or a third of Cicero’s
De re publica have been discovered in a fifth- or sixth-century ce palimpsest, which also contains
St. Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms (Cicero 1977: 9).
68
Augustine 1957–72: 2.16–17 (book 4.4.25).
immortality. Iskandar gives up empire not out of virtue but from pride. He selfishly
pursues the water of life on his own, not wanting to share immortality so as to distin-
guish himself from others (berlainan hamba daripada mereka itu, 622).69 The futile
search for immortality warns against human ambition and cupidity. Even Iskandar’s
followers learn a lesson on cupidity. In the land of darkness, the army hears a clattering
sound from the movement of their horses’ feet and gets only an enigmatic explanation
from Khidir. He declares that those who take many of the objects and those who take
only a few will both regret it (622). True to Khidir’s prediction, when they emerge into
daylight to discover the stones are precious jewels, all of them regret not taking even
more. Material possession leads to futile desire. In his selfish pursuit of individual
immortality, Iskandar loses both empire and himself.
As I. Friedländer notes, the motif of the water of life is often linked to the journey
to the end of the world.70 The marvels Iskandar encounters in his solo journey high-
light the conclusion’s eschatological frame. He meets a talking bird speaking an
Islamic formula, inviting him to contemplate God’s greatness, and is rebuked by the
archangel Israfil (Asrafil) for pride. The archangel’s reminder to fear God prompts his
weeping but Iskandar’s penitence is not rewarded with immortality. His further trials
rewrite the story of the fall in Genesis. Meeting an old man, the devil in disguise,
Iskandar foolishly tells him of Israfil’s gifts of a wonder stone (a gem) and a branch of
heavenly grapes so potent that one will never hunger nor thirst nor ever fall ill.71 But
like Gilgamesh losing the herb of life, Iskandar ends up losing the gifts when tempted
by the old man’s fruit:
Adapun maka dikeluarkannya oleh orang tuha itu sebiji buah tuhfah merah bercampur kuning
warnanya. Baunya seperti bau kesturi. Maka dilihat baginda akan buah kayu itu. Maka ingatlah
rasa hatinya akan dia. Dan lekatlah matanya memandang akan dia buah kayu itu. (634)
[Then that old man took out an apple, red mixed with yellow in color, with a smell like musk.
Seeing the fruit of the tree, and remembering his desire for it, his highness affixed his eyes on
the fruit.]72
Arousing his senses, the fruit incites Iskandar’s desire to a fever pitch. Eating it fails to
satisfy his hunger and his grapes go missing. His sensual desire for the fruit shows the
bodily and material foundations of his ambitions. When the old man identifies himself
as the devil who caused Adam’s fall, he admits acting out of envy (dengki, 635). In con-
trast to Iskandar’s conquests to bring about a cosmopolitan Islam, the devil’s war on
69
Cambridge Add. MS. 3770, excerpted by Van Leeuwen, makes the point even more starkly: “Maka
betapa kiranja kelebihan hamba daripada meréka itoe?” (Thus how to estimate my greatness as being more
than them?) (Leeuwen 1937: 211).
70
Friedländer 1913: 37.
71
The story of the wonder stone, about a human eye that loses power when covered with dust, probably
has a Jewish origin and is alluded to in the Qur’ān (Stoneman 2012b: 3–4); I discuss Hikayat Iskandar
Zulkarnain’s wonder stone episode in Ng 2016.
72
Omitted from the published edition are two sentences included in Soeratno’s dissertation (Hikayat
Iskandar Zulkarnain 1988: 2.1407).
humans lack rational basis. Subsequent trials of similar encounters with devils in
disguise teach Iskandar to recognize the truth, representing yet another reconversion
of the hero. In his search for immortality, Iskandar is guilty of abandoning his moral
guide, Khidir, and his duties as king.
Lessons on ambition and pride are recapitulated at Iskandar’s funeral, which incor
porates the Laments of the Philosophers at Alexander’s tomb. With Syriac and other
Eastern exemplars, the Laments attached to medieval legends of Alexander both in
Eastern and Western versions through translation from Arabic, interpolated into the I3
recension of the Latin Historia de preliis, and also circulated in Tudor England, appear-
ing in books of popular exempla.73 The wise men’s eulogies are a series of maxims:
Maka kata hakim tuha pada yang banyak, ujarnya, “Adapun inilah Raja Iskandar yang kasih
emas dan perak. Maka sekarang bercerailah dengan dia masuk ke dalam perut bumi.” Maka
berkata hakim yang kedua, “Inilah Raja Iskandar yang memarang segala negeri. Masuklah ia
ke dalam bumi seorang dirinya.” (652)
[Then the oldest judge said, “For this is King Alexander who loved gold and silver. Now are we
parted with him entering the earth’s stomach.” Then the second judge said, “This is King
Alexander who warred in all countries. He enters the earth alone.”]
The eulogies recall Iskandar’s worldly desires for glory to contrast them with the lone-
liness of death when he is shorn of all possessions. Even his grieving mother takes him
for a cautionary lesson:
Telah dilaluinya daripada masyri[k] datang ke padang yang luas-luas laut dan darat dan bukit
yang tinggi-tinggi dengan segala bala tenteranya yang tiada terpermanai, sekarang dibuangkan
ia ke dalam bumi dengan tangan hampa, tiadalah berharta. Daripada emas dan perak suatu
pun tiada. Maka sangatlah kasihan hatinya. (652)
[Having crossed from the west to come to wide oceans, land and tall hills with all his incalcu
lable army, he is now thrown into the earth, his hand empty, without possessions, neither of
gold nor silver, not one bit. Thus is he most pitiful.]
From admired conqueror to object of pity, Iskandar’s worldly achievements cannot

overcome death’s leveling force. In life, Iskandar towers above all other men, but in
death he is all too human. In life, supported by an innumerably large army, he has
uncountable wealth, but in death, stripped of possessions, he returns to the earth
alone and naked.
These two Alexanders stand in stark contrast to each other. The first gains an empire
from a position of apparent weakness while the second loses it. The social critique of
the first episode is transmuted into an examination of private spiritual values in the
second. Despite Hikayat’s sober ending, these two examples together underscore
73
Brock 1970: esp. 205–6; see also Hertz 1905: 130–53. The Laments are included in the final dialogue,
“Of lyfe and deth,” of the 1530 Dialoges of Creatures Moralysed, which contains several anecdotes about
Alexander (Kratzmann and Gee 1988: 122); one copy dated 1577 was signed by the Cambridge scholar and
Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey.
the transferability of empire. An empire lost may be won again. At least this seems to
be the reading Sejarah Melayu adopts, not only with its numerous translationes but
also, as I discuss next, in its focus on failed monarchs.
Alexandrian Translatio imperii in the Malay Annals

A variety of Malay courts claimed Alexander. Early kings were named after him, such
as the third ruler of Melaka, Iskandar Syah, also called Dhū’lqarnayn, mentioned by
Chinese records (1414–24) and by de Albuquerque.74 Anthony Reid notes, “The chroni-
cles and letters of Sumatran and Peninsula kings—Melaka, Minangkabau, Palembang,
Aceh, Deli, Johor, and Pahang—all claimed that their dynasties descended from
Alexander,” while J. J. Ras has traced the enormous impact of the Hikayat Iskandar
Zulkarnain on the mythic identity of Malay royalty.75 The originary sultanate tracing
origins to Alexander was the line of Palembang sultans. The former capital of the
powerful medieval kingdom of Srivijaya in Sumatra, Palembang controlled a large part
of the eastern archipelago, including Pasai, from at least the seventh century until the
thirteenth, forging trading connections with India and China. From Palembang came
sultans of Melaka, the center of a flourishing fifteenth-century trading empire. After
Portuguese capture of Melaka, the sultanate shifted to Johor to establish a new Riau-
Lingga sultanate, which together with Aceh in north Sumatra displaced Melaka as the
regional power. As late as the nineteenth century, Alexander the Great continued to
define Malay royal identity. The genealogy of Palembang sultans includes separate
genealogical trees going back to the biblical Adam and to Iskandar Zulkarnain,
Alexander’s Malay name (Figure 2.2).76 Southeast Asian translatio imperii, as compli-
cated as the Habsburgs’ myth-making, lends Alexander’s prestige as world sovereign to
local monarchs.
One of the story’s earliest citations, Sejarah Melayu indicates a renewed interest in
Alexander in the sixteenth-century context of increasing engagement with Europeans.
A history of the Melakan sultanate from its founding to its fall with the 1511 Portuguese
conquest, Sejarah Melayu was composed around 1536 in the aftermath of conquest
and subsequently recopied and revised in Johor in 1612.77 Much changed between
those dates. In the few years prior to 1612 Portuguese Melaka was friendly enough
74
Sejarah Melayu 1998: 104; all quotations are from Cheah’s edition and cited parenthetically; transla-
tions are from Brown, Sejarah Melayu 1970; if a parenthetical citation is not given to Brown, translations
are mine.
75
Reid 1988–93: 2.153; Ras 1968: 100–35. See also Marsden 1783: 338–42; Schrieke 1942: 2.253; and
Chambert-Loir 2006a.
76
“Genealogies of rulers of Palembang,” copied by Raden Mochtar bin Raden Rangga Astrawidjaija
Abdulla at Palembang, January 22, 1869, manuscript Or. 78, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde, Leiden. On the dynastic uses of Iskandar Zulkarnain as Raja Rum (king of Rome or Istanbul)
in Sejarah Melayu and Tambo Minangkabau, a Sumatran chronicle, see Braginsky 2015b: 78–108.
77
For authorship and dating, see Winstedt 1938a and 1938b; Hussein 1987: 120–2; Iskandar 1967;
Roolvink 1967; and Cheah 1998.
Figure 2.2 Detail from “Genealogies of Rulers of Palembang,” copied by Raden Mochtar bin
Raden Rangga Astrawidjaija Abdulla at Palembang, January 22, 1869 showing descent from
Iskandar Zulkarnain. MS Or. 78, f2.
Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden University Libraries.
with Johor to stop the latter’s developing alliance with the Dutch. Johor made peace
with Melaka when their Dutch allies withdrew support as a result of a 1609 treaty
between the Low Countries and Spain that began the Twelve Years Truce.78 The 1612
revision may have even been prompted by a Portuguese gift of a manuscript during a
1611/12 embassy. The preface refers to “a Malay history brought by people from Goa”
(hikayat Melayu di-bawa oleh orang dari Goa), which may be the manuscript of Sejarah
Melayu brought from Portuguese Goa in India. Goa’s identification is disputed as there
is a Gowa in South Sulawesi, but arguments for the capital of the Portuguese Estado da
Índia are the most sound. Particularly convincing is C. A. Gibson-Hill’s argument that
the Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto, keeper of the Portuguese archives in Goa
from at least 1604 until 1616 (and friend of poet Luís Camões), must have had access to
Sejarah Melayu. His account of the story of Iskandar Shah, the founder of Melaka,
departs from that of other Portuguese chroniclers. While Tomé Pires, Albuquerque,
Barros, and Eredia depict him as a refugee and murderer, Couto’s narrative closely
conforms to Sejarah Melayu’s more positive portrayal.79 As Richard Winstedt shows,
the Raffles Malay MS. 18 (Blagden) recension, thought to be completed around 1536,
differs from the later 1612 Shellabear recension in key ways: the latter included “faked
pedigrees and incidents to aggrandise the Malacca Sultans and Bendaharas [prime
ministers] and deleted chapters referring to the senior and legitimist branch of Malacca
royalty in Perak” and omitted several chapters, including one “because it deals with
fighting the Portuguese, with whom in 1610 Johore had made a treaty of friendship, and
because it shows Sultan Mahmud snubbing the Bendahara Paduka Tuan.”80 The omis-
sions and revisions stem from internal conflicts, as the junior Melaka branch in Johor,
reviving itself into the Riau-Lingga empire, asserted ascendancy over the older branch
in Perak. The later recension shows a more accommodationist view of the Portuguese,
while the earliest recension reveals initial reactions.
In its original appropriation of the Alexander story, Sejarah Melayu constitutes a
paradigmatic reading of Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain that would be imitated by other
chronicles in the region—in Chapter 8 I discuss an important one from Aceh. In the
sixteenth-century context of Johor’s intermittent warfare with the Portuguese prior to
the 1610 peace treaty, a religious hero would have been attractive and pertinent to a
court battling to recapture their lost capital. Twentieth-century nationalists inter-
preted this geographically localized group in broad racial and religious terms to think
the Malay nation back in time; but if the work glorifies the Melakan sultanate and
asserts the “Superiority of the ‘men of Melaka’ over all others,” it does not hew to a nar-
row ethnicist line.81 Raffles MS. 18 reveals a cosmopolitan perspective, stressing Tamil
78
Borschberg 2014; Bassett suggests, “the sultan of Johore felt himself to be so inadequately supported
by the Dutch Company that he made peace with the Portuguese in October 1610” (Bassett 1960: 16).
79
Gibson-Hill 1956: 185. See also Winstedt 1949. For a contrary view, see Roolvink 1967.
80
Winstedt 1938b: 27–8, 33.
81
Sejarah Melayu 1970: x; Hussein 1966; Iskandar 1967.
influences omitted in later recensions. Rather than a purely local history, Sejarah
Melayu emphasizes networks connecting Southeast Asia to other polities.
Beginning with the Alexander story, Sejarah Melayu refers readers to the romance
for the account of battles, focusing instead on Alexander’s post-conquest marriage to
the Indian princess. Highlighting marriage alliances and descent, the text details
Alexander’s Indian line of descendants. Rather than a clear demarcation between East
and West, the network of alliances and descent reach far West to Alexander, who is “of
the race of Romans from the country of Macedonia” (2) (Rum bangsanya, Makaduniah
namanya negerinya, 67), and to India. His Indian son is linked through marriage to the
royal line of Turkey. The network of descent reaches Southeast Asia when three princes
from Alexander’s Indian line appear in Palembang, declaring:
Bahawa kami daripada anak cucu Iskandar Zulqarnain; nasab kami daripada Raja Nusyirwan,
raja masyrik maghrib; pancar kami daripada Raja Sulaiman ʿalayhissalam. (84)
We are descended from Raja Iskandar Dzu’lkarnain: of the lineage of Raja Nusyirwan
[Anushirwan], Lord of the East and the West, are we. Our line springs from Raja Sulaiman
(upon him be peace). (Brown 14)
With several descendants, Alexander’s legacy transfers to several states. By tracing

their royal ancestry back to Alexander, early modern Malay states acknowledge ties
with the Mediterranean. History is conceived of in global, even universal terms.
Remade into a proselytizing Muslim, Alexander’s Eastern alliances bring forth descen-
dants who see themselves as lords of East and West.
The global context is reiterated and intensified by the repeating narrative of travel
and arrival. Rulers tend to come from elsewhere. Iskandar Zulkarnain is paradigmatic
of a familiar pattern of “stranger-kings” in Southeast Asia.82 Southeast Asian political
systems routinely incorporated foreigners into its governing class. The basic theme of
Sejarah Melayu, a history of the Melakan sultanate and thus “a premier text on Malay
sovereignty,” argues Engseng Ho, is “the constitution of a Malay polity as a combination
of local ruler and powerful outsider” through “diarchy, marriage alliance, father-in-
law and son-in-law, chief minister and ruler.”83 The Sejarah Melayu, contends Ho, deals
with the “perpetual problem of change . . . not by denying, but by embracing and sub-
suming it”; Alexandrian descent at the beginning of the text becomes paradigmatic of
subsequent episodes with the same “pattern of conquest and alliance-creation.”84 This
long-standing pattern of stranger-kings persisted at least into the eighteenth-century,
as Ḥaḍrami Arab sāda (plural for sayyid) married into the ruling elite.85 Melakan
sovereignty is rooted in the incorporation of stranger-kings. Sometime ago Marshall
Sahlins, using the example of Polynesia, suggested that rather than autochtonously
generated premodern sovereignties are understood as foreign, appearing especially
in the form of a stranger-king from abroad. This is the case not just with Iskandar
Kathirithamby-Wells 2009; Ho 2013.
82 83
Ho 2013: 146, 152.
Ho 2013: 155. 85 Kathirithamby-Wells 2009.
84
Zulkarnain, but also with a series of figures in Sejarah Melayu, including the founder of
Melaka Parameswara, the Palembang prince in exile who establishes a new kingdom
across the straits twice (first in Singapore and then in Melaka).
For lack of a better term I call this “stranger sovereignty,” defined as a power that
comes from outside. Sahlins’s concept applies well to Sejarah Melayu but can be
extended to non-kingly figures: as I discuss in Chapter 10, the famed Melakan warrior
Hang Tuah’s literary character is influenced by the depiction of Iskandar Zulkarnain as
a stranger. In Sejarah Melayu it is unsurprising to find this alien sovereignty devolving
onto Iskandar’s descendants. His descendants retain the aura of coming from abroad
to become stranger-kings in Southeast Asia. In fact, Raffles MS. 18 recension empha-
sizes their Tamil origin. Winstedt suggests that Sejarah Melayu was drafted in Melaka,
where “[t]here were strong Tamil and Indian influences in the cosmopolitan port . . .
where trade was conducted by Tamils and Tamil half-castes, [and] where a coup d’etat
by Muslim Tamils crushed Hinduism and created the Muslim Sultanate.”86 Conversely,
seventeenth-century Johor had little Tamil influence, and so its later recensions of
Sejarah Melayu scrubbed Tamil elements out of the text. The Tamil overlay of the earliest
recension gives a much stronger sense of openness to strangers; and it reflects the
trade and textual networks that connected Southeast Asia to South India.87 Alexander’s
Southeast Asian descendants are made raja of states that already have kings, who con-
veniently recognize their superiority and willingly yield their places. History’s other
side is the removals of sovereignty from place to place, a translatio imperii that excludes
a purely national history. In Sejarah Melayu the translation of sovereignty shifts from
Macedonia to India and thence to Southeast Asia; in Southeast Asia sovereignty is
translated from Palembang in Sumatra to Singapore and only then to Melaka. Just as
sovereignty easily translates, outsiders fluidly become insiders.
Sejarah Melayu repeatedly references Iskandar as an ancestor through several
translationes. In Singapore, a royal prince’s head, dented in the middle by the midwife,
has two raised sides resembling horns, so named “Raja Iskandar Zulkarnain” (King
Alexander the Two-horned, 104). In Melaka, having married Javanese and Chinese
princesses, Sultan Mansur Syah’s greatness is marked by cosmopolitan alliances com-
parable to Alexander’s: “Karena pada zaman dahulu kala Raja Iskandar Zulqarnain
hanya yang beristerikan anak raja Cina; akan sekarang, Yang Dipertuanlah” (In the old
days only King Alexander the Two-horned could wed a Chinese princess, but now
your highness has done the same, 186). Invocations of Alexander reiterate Southeast
Asia’s links to other kingdoms and empires through a global network stretching from
the Mediterranean to China.
The most extensive use of the Alexander Romance is an episode about the royal
Indian ancestors of Palembang’s kings. King Culan is both Alexander’s descendant and
an Alexander figure. Culan is the heir of a marriage between a descendant of Alexander
and the daughter of Indian Raja Shulan of Nagapatam, descendant of Persian king
86
Winstedt 1938: 28. Ricci 2011.
87
Anushirwan, transliterated as Nusyirwan in Malay. This marriage depicts the joining

of Persian and Macedonian lines. As heir to two great lineages, Culan succeeds to the
throne to govern a great empire of kings east and west (segala raja masyrik maghrib, 78).
Like the romance Alexander, Culan constructs a diving bell to explore the undersea
world. Reaching the watery world of Dika, with a population half pagan and half
Muslim, he marries the princess, who produces three sons. Concerned about preserv-
ing his Alexandrian legacy, Culan asks his father-in-law, “Adapun jikalau anak hamba
ini besar, hendaklah tuan hamba hantarkan ke dunia supaya lekat kerajaan Raja
Iskandar Zulqarnain itu jangan berputusan selama-lamanya” (When my children are
grown, please sent them to the world so that the empire of Alexander the Two-horned
continues without end, 81). Taking his leave, Culan rides a horse out of the ocean,
flying into the sky (terbang ke udara, 82), an image bearing some resemblance to the
prophet Muhammad’s miʿradj, or ascent to heaven, conducted by the archangel
Gabriel on a winged horse, or perhaps to the legendary Persian king Kay Kāvus.88 That
Culan’s aerial flight closely follows upon his undersea exploration to recall the close
connection of these two motifs from the romance Alexander stories of later coinage
that originated from the Talmud.89 Firuza Melville notes that preferences for the coupled
stories were divided: “the Christian world gave priority to Alexander’s investigation
of the heavens (though very often coupled with the sea episode), while in the Eastern
literature Alexander is never mentioned as an aviator, but only as a diver and even
then only in very few sources.”90 The conjunction of diving and flying in Culan’s story
points to its derivation from the Alexander Romance and to their preservation as coupled
motifs in the Malay version. In Sejarah Melayu, Culan marks his aquatic adventure by
burying a chest of gems on an island. There he makes a millenial prediction: “Akhir
zaman kelak ada seorang raja daripada anak cucuku, ialah beroleh arta ini, dan raja
itulah kelak menaklukkan segala negeri yang di bawah angin ini” (At the end of time one
of my descendants will obtain this treasure, and that king will later conquer all the coun-
tries below the wind, 82). Reenacting Alexander’s marvelous crossing of boundaries,
Culan’s story foreshadows the forging of alliances across the watery space of the Indian
Ocean and the extension of Alexandrian empire and genealogy to Southeast Asia.
Sejarah Melayu reads the Alexander Romance as both a genealogical narrative and a
narrative of exploration. Genealogy is a repeated theme, but it is one that admits outsid-
ers. Descendant of the outsider Alexander, Culan himself becomes an outsider in the
underwater country, where he is absorbed into the ruling power. His story highlights
88
The episode is found in the Qur’ān 81.19–25 and 53.1–21: see entry on Miʿradj in The Encyclopaedia
of Islam, 2nd ed., which includes a section by J. Knappert on “Miʿradj literature in Indonesia”
(Fouchécour 2012). R. Paret’s entry on al-Burāḳ, the name sometimes given to Muhammad’s mount, notes
that Ṭabarī’s commentary describes it as a horse but that earlier ḥ adīths describe a cross between a mule
and an ass while later texts gave it wings (Paret 2012). See also Gruber 2008. For Kay Kāvus, see
Melville 2012.
89
Pal. Talmud Avodah Zarah 3.1.42c; Midrash Bamidbar Rabba 13.14; Pirge d’Rabbi Elieser 11; cited in
Stoneman 2008: 112.
90
Melville 2012: 407.
Alexander’s link to travel and marvels, and especially Alexander as a technocrat who
masters sea and sky. But this technological mastery builds bridges across cultures. Two
features mark empire in the Southeast Asian reading of Alexander. First, rather than
utterly alien strangers, the Alexander-figure finds a mixed population of pagans and
Muslims and forges an alliance with them through an affective relation. Imperial
expansion comes through the widening of kinship relations, a key feature of Southeast
Asian narratives I discuss later. Second, the Alexander-figure is a preeminent explorer
whose conquest of nature owes much to technology. Exploration underlies imperial
expansion. A signal feature of empire in Hikayat Iskandar is its capacity to absorb
strangers, a capaciousness that begins with a hero whose identity is surprisingly fluid.
But in Sejarah Melayu an imagined community of kin finds its limits in the Portuguese.
Alexander in Melaka’s Fall

Sejarah Melayu emphasizes the assimilability of outsiders in translatio imperii, but
its appropriation of Alexander also needs to be read in the context of European
interactions. Just as Constantinople’s fall changed the balance of power in the West,
so did Melaka’s. The latter was equally framed by the contest over Alexander. Sejarah
Melayu’s Alexandrian genealogy asserts a royal antiquity against Portuguese incur-
sion, while the Portuguese claimed to overgo Alexander. In Sejarah Melayu, this event
introduced a new category of unassimilable outsiders termed feringgi, or Franks,
introducing the rhetoric of holy war.
The Portuguese aggressively claimed not only the literary mantle of Alexander but
also the material signs of Asian conquest. To celebrate Melaka’s capture, Manuel I sent
an embassy to Pope Leo X in 1514 with a menagerie of exotic animals that included a
cheetah, two leopards, a panther, parrots, and a Persian horse with an Asian elephant
as centerpiece.91 An African rode on the white Persian and a “Saracen” guided the ele-
phant while its Indian mahout rode astride it; Portuguese ambassadors dressed in an
“Indian” style, riding horses with gold harnesses decorated with Mauresque reliefs.
The whole effect was one of oriental riches.92 The elephant was particularly unusual,
not seen living in Rome since antiquity. Moreover, this specimen was said to be a white
elephant: albino elephants were long kept as sacred by monarchs of mainland Southeast
Asia. The elephant, called Hanno—a Carthaginian name that recalls Hannibal, the
great military nemesis of the ancient Roman Republic—delighted Roman audiences,
which probably included Leonardo da Vinci, and won the Pope’s devotion: it was
celebrated in verse by Pasquale Malaspina and its likeness captured by Raphael.93 The
91
On Hanno at Leo’s court, see Bedini 1998. On this embassy and elephants in Europe, see Lach 1965–93:
2.1.124–58.
92
Bedini 1998: 47; A. Andrade 1974: 119–31.
93
For literary celebrations of the elephant and embassy, see Bedini 1998: 60–3, 238–40; Latin verses are
quoted in Ciutiis 1899: 40–2 n. Raphael’s sketch of Hanno is lost, but several others based on his original
remain, including at the Ashmolean, Oxford (Lach 1965–93: 2.1.135–44).
occasion was Leo’s coronation, but Manuel wanted papal support for Portugal’s claim
to Southeast Asia’s Maluku spice islands in accordance to the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Elephant tracks connected Rome and Lisbon to Southeast Asia. At Melaka’s capture,
the Portuguese took seven war elephants from the defeated army, which might have
stocked Manuel’s stable in Lisbon: he started collecting “elephants of state” to use in
ceremonial processions and sending them as gifts to other rulers, including the king
of Java.94 For Europeans, elephants were classical symbols of royal power, coming
into their consciousness through Alexander the Great’s conquests. Although Ctesias
of Cnidus, who served as physician to the Achaemenid king Artaxerxes II, mentioned
Indian war elephants, it was in the 331 bce Battle of Gaugamela when the Greeks
first encountered them in the battlefield; captured with the defeat of Darius III,
these elephants became the first of Alexander’s collection.95 In his campaign in India
(326–324 bce), Alexander deployed war elephants and captured more from Porus’
Indian army, animals which Aristotle later meticulously described in his Historia
animalium (History of Animals). Alexander’s conquests initiated widespread acqui-
sition and use of war elephants—along with their Indian hunters and trainers—in
Mediterranean warfare, especially in the succession wars following his demise,
despite the lack of local supplies.96 Indian military techniques of war elephants spread
westward—adopted by Greeks and Macedonians, Persians, Carthaginians, Romans,
Ghaznavis, and Turkic groups—and eastward to Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia’s
Indianizing kingdoms, places like Cambodia, Burma, Java, and Sumatra, war elephants
arrived with Indian models of kingship.97 I would add that literary representation
of the elephant in early modern Southeast Asia is intertwined with the reception of
Alexander stories, both used in tandem to frame the arrival of Europeans (discussed in
Chapter 8). Elephants gained a special place in Alexander’s self-fashioning. In an act of
religious devotion, he dedicated Porus’ bravest elephant, whom he named Ajax, to the
sun, perhaps mimicking Indian practices.98 Alexander entered Babylon in a chariot
drawn by elephants, a triumph later used to decorate his funeral chariot.99 Alexander,
who imitated Dionysus in the god’s triumphant return from India, was in turn imitated
94
Lach 1965–93: 2.1.135–6. Afonso de Albuquerque’s account reads: “Afonso Dalboquerque dispatched
the ambassador, and with him he sent to the King of Java one of the elephants which had been captured in
Malaca, for in that country they are held in very great esteem, and a piece of scarlet, and another of velvet
crimson, and granted him free passage for himself and for the transport of the elephant” (Albuquerque
1964: 3.161).
95
Ctesias 2008: 64–5, 141; Arrian 1976-83: 2.272–3, book III, 15.4–6; Arrian 1971: 171–2; see
Goukowsky 1972.
96
Trautmann 2015: 227–8, and chapter 6, 216–60, passim; Trautmann notes the coincidence of Greek
and Indian military theory (229); see also Scullard 1974.
97
Trautmann 2015: 261–97.
98
Ancient India developed the science of elephants, elucidated in treatises such as the Sanskrit
Matanga-lila (Egerton 1931).
99
Diodorus Siculus claims Alexander “was the first man ever to celebrate a triumph seated on an
Indian elephant” (Diodorus Siculus 1933–67: 2.346–7, book 4.3; on the funeral chariot, 9.86–95, book
18.26–8). For Alexander’s entry into Babylon, see Friedreich 1859: 440.
by his successors and by Romans and in Renaissance revivals down to as late as

Bernini’s 1667 monument of an elephant and obelisk for Pope Alexander VII.100
Even before Hanno got to Rome, Manuel was proclaimed another Alexander. In
1513, upon news of Melaka’s capture, Leo commanded a canon of St. Peter and famed
orator, Camillo Portio or Porzio, to compose a speech in Manuel’s honor.101 Porzio’s
Latin oration praises Manuel lavishly:
We read concerning that great Alexander, Prince of Macedon, that when he arrived at the
country of India, and had assaulted a fortified city well defended by its inhabitants, he held it to
be of such great importance, and it appeared to be so successful a matter to have captured the
place, that his soldiers did not fail to declare that he was more valiant than Hercules. If this be
so, what triumphs, what sovereign honour is due to the King D. Manuel, who has subjects by
whose hands and might he has not only conquered by force of arms a city of India, but with a
continued round of his victories kept on going about India itself—a country never beheld by
the Romans, unknown to the Goths, and in vain assailed on many occasions by the famous
Sesostris, King of Egypt, Cyrus, and Semiramis.102
Manuel had never step foot in India, his military expeditions conducted by surrogates,
but Porzio is gripped by the reenactment of ancient glory in the rediscovery of India, in
which Melaka holds a special place as the Golden Chersonese of classical literature.103
The ambassador from Venice to Lisbon, Pietro Pasqualigo, also praises Manuel for
rivaling the achievements of the ancients:
That which neither the Carthaginians of old achieved, nor the Romans who held the power
after the overthrow of Carthage, nor Alexander, that great world explorer, nor all of Greece in
the days when she flourished, nor the Egyptian and Assyrian kings, your excellence and good
fortune have achieved. . . . The greatest kings and unconquered nations of the past used to boast
justifiably that they had extended their power to the ocean, but you, invincible King, are
entitled to take pride in having advanced your power to the lower hemisphere and to the
Antipodes. What is greatest and most memorable of all, you have brought together under
your command peoples whom nature divides, and with your commerce you have joined two
different worlds.104
A greater Alexander, Manuel unites disparate worlds. Sliding from conquest to

commerce, the text covertly recognizes that what the Portuguese established was a
trade network. Still, Pasqualigo asserts a universalism in bringing peoples together in
a comparison to Alexander that highlights the breaching of boundaries.
Alexander is a figure of cultural mélange, bringing together “peoples whom nature
divides,” but he can be read differently. Non-Europeans presented the Portuguese not
100
W. Heckscher 1947: 158–9. Before crossing the Rubicon, Julius Caesar struck a medal showing
an elephant trampling a serpent; his family were proud that their name, Julia, derived from elephas
(W. Heckscher 1947: 160).
101
Albuquerque 1964: 3.171 n. 1; for Porzio’s oration, 3.172–87. See also Ciutiis 1899: 10–12; Ciutiis
cannot find Porzio’s original Latin text in the Vatican archives.
102
Albuquerque 1964: 3.181–2. 103
Albuquerque 1964: 3.174–5.
104
Weinstein 1960: 45–6 (English translation), 37 (Latin text).
Figure 2.3 World map, Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (Entertainment for He Who
Longs to Travel the World), copied from Muhammad al-Idrisi (c.1110–66) in Cairo, 1553;
Gog and Magog (‫ )يأجوج و مأجوج‬are confined by Alexander’s wall in the bottom left corner.
MS Pococke 375, f. 3v–4. The Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford.
Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
as imitating Alexander but as violating traditions he established. An Arab chronicler

from Alexandria, Egypt, Ibn Iyas, framed Portuguese discovery of the sea-route to
India in terms of the breaking of Alexander’s wall that was intended to restrain Gog
and Magog as forces of barbarity (Figure 2.3).105 Sejarah Melayu’s several translationes
imperii associate Alexander with imperial expansion, but he also reveals boundaries not
to be crossed. In this alternate reading, the failure lies with the sovereign’s overweening
105
R. B. Serjeant comments: “A most curious tale is related by Ibn Iyas which reveals the ignorance of
the Egyptians of the nature of the Portuguese exploit in circumnavigating the Cape, for therein it is stated
that the Franks had broken the wall (sudd, ‫ ) سد‬which Alexander had set up in ancient times” (Serjeant 1963:
26). See Kahle and Mustafa 1932: 5.109; and Subrahmanyam 1997a: 256.
ambition, just as Iskandar fails to find the water of life. In one episode, Sultan Mansur
Syah desires to marry the immortal Puteri Gunung Ledang, a legendary princess of
Mount Ledang, to surpass all other kings. His ministers point out that he already
matches Alexander, having married the princesses of Java and China:
Apa pula yang lebih daripada itu? Karena pada zaman dahulu kala Raja Iskandar Zulqarnain
hanya yang beristerikan anak raja Cina; akan sekarang, Yang Dipertuanlah. (186)
What is more than that? For in the old days only King Alexander married a Chinese princess;
now Your Highness has done so.
Unsatisfied, Mansur desires to overgo even Alexander. However, the mission ends in
failure as the princess Ledang sets a number of impossible conditions.
While the princess Ledang episode is not directly linked to the Portuguese chapters,
the problem of a flawed sovereign reappears in the latter. Crucially, the Portuguese
marks a sharp change in Sejarah Melayu’s representation of outsiders. Engseng Ho
suggests that earlier thinking on outsiders differs from that of the colonial era. For
the colonial era, Anthony Milner describes how outsiders were assimilated into the
culture in a process known as masuk Melayu. In premodern times, however, says Ho,
outsiders “negotiate the terms of entry, re-channel the ascent/descent lines of the
community, or begin to hand out names and titles . . . The text accords active and
dynamic roles for outsiders, constitutive as well as destructive ones. They partake
in the creation of polity and in its destruction too.”106 If Alexander is the originary
outsider who becomes constitutive of sovereignty to create what I term “stranger
sovereignty” (explored further in Chapter 10), the Portuguese are archetypal outsiders
destroying the polity.
Sejarah Melayu devotes its last chapters to the Portuguese’s violent interaction with
Melaka. Even from their first arrival, they are marked as different, greeted with aston-
ishment and surprise, despite the city’s cosmopolitan populace:
Hatta maka datang sebuah kapal Feringgi dari Guha, maka ia pun berniagalah di Melaka.
Maka dilihat oleh Feringgi itu negeri terlalu makmur dan bandarnya pun terlalu ramai. Maka
segala orang Melaka pun berkampung melihat rupa Feringgi, maka sekalian hairan, katanya,
“Ia ini Benggali putih”. Maka seorang-seorang Feringgi itu, berpuluh-puluh orang laki-laki
mengerumusi dia; ada yang memutar janggut Feringgi itu, ada yang menjamah kapala Feringgi
itu, ada yang mengambil cepiaunya, ada yang memegang tangannya. (254)
After a while there came a ship of the Franks from Goa trading to Malaka: and the Franks
perceived how prosperous and well populated the port was. The people of Malaka for their part
came crowding to see what the Franks looked like; and they were all astonished and said,
“These are white Bengalis!” Around each Frank there would be a crowd of Malays, some of
them twisting his beard, some of them fingering his head, some taking off his hat, some grasp-
ing his hand. (Brown 151)
106
Ho 2013: 153; Milner 1982. Milner’s later work considers twentieth-century challenges to the system
of symbolic power revolving around the sultan (Milner 1995).
What makes the Portuguese different and unassimilable? While the description of the
Portuguese as “white” may suggest a racial ideology at work, the names “Frank” and
“Bengali” are of more consequence. “Bengali” may have class overtones. Tomé Pires
writes that when the Melakans “want to insult a man, they call him Bengalee. They are
very treacherous; they are very sharpwitted.”107 Historian Anthony Reid suggests that
they were a “mercantile rather than a military people” and “more numerous and more
resented” than the Arabs.108 Whiteness, however, did not necessarily have negative
connotations: Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain’s Alexander is white.
In his study of European representations of the East Indies, Shankar Raman points
to this episode in Sejarah Melayu as a challenge to familiar categories: “Noting the
curious identification of the Europeans with familiar Indian traders leads to rethink-
ing representations surrounding ‘India’ in terms of identities and categories derived
from a non-European perspective. Although not necessarily any ‘truer’ than European
representations, such figures enable a different understanding of the possibilities
and modes of resistance to European colonial depredation.”109 The point is well taken
though Sejarah Melayu’s challenging of categories is far more profound. Even while
Europeans saw their adventures in the East in terms of Alexander’s c onquests—
Raman discusses Portuguese claims to Alexander as well as the use of vignettes from
the Alexander Romance in European colonialist cartography—the peoples they
interacted with were themselves claiming an Alexandrian royal lineage. A reading
of the Sejarah Melayu as a text in its own right shows how Raman’s argument—
that “Alexander stands for the farthest possibilities of historical action in the world,
[and] the evocation of his achievements equally underscores the limits of such
action”—applies not only to the European texts that are the focus of his study but also
to Malay ones.110
More illuminating is Sejarah Melayu’s use of the name “Frank,” linking the Portuguese
to crusaders invading the holy lands. During Elizabeth I’s reign, when the English
started diplomatic relations with Southeast Asia, they interpreted Southeast Asian use
of “Frank” in precisely this way. William Bedwell, Oxford scholar and Arabic transla-
tor, annotated the word in his translation of a 1602–3 letter from Sultan Alauddin
Riʿayat Syah of Aceh brought back by James Lancaster to Elizabeth: “For euer since
Godfrey of Bologne yt persecuteed the Saracens in Palestina, they haue called all the
westerne inhabitants generall ‫الفرنجي‬, franci. So yt here he calleth ye K. of Spaine Sultan
of ‫ الفرنجي‬as their greatest enemie.”111 Portugal was under Spanish rule from 1580 to
1640. Indeed, the Dutch used this knowledge to seek an alliance with Aceh. Maurice
of Nassau’s 1600 letter to Sultan Alauddin equated the Dutch’s war for independence
107
Pires 1944: 1.93. 108
Reid 1994: 276.
109
Raman 2001: 26. Although Raman uses the term “India” (in scare quotation marks), much of his
book treats English works set in Southeast Asia.
110
Raman 2001: 105; for European uses of Alexander, 29, 91–3, 104–5, 132–5.
111
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Or. 575.7, f. 19.
with Aceh’s hostilities with the Portuguese.112 Earlier crusading history influenced
contemporary politics. Put into a global framework, the Portuguese are connected to
medieval Middle Eastern history.
In Sejarah Melayu the Portuguese are negative versions of Iskandar Zulkarnain. If
Hikayat Iskandar’s protagonist uses technology for conversion, the Portuguese use it
out of greed. When he hears of Melaka’s prosperity, the viceroy Alfonso de Albuquerque
is described as “seized with desire to possess it” (Brown 151) (maka ia terlalu ingin
melihat negeri Melaka itu, 254). Albuquerque’s passion resembles Iskandar’s desire
for immortality. European firearms are depicted as disruptive and violent, destroying
empire rather than establishing it. The puzzling scene in Sejarah Melayu of Melakan
confusion about cannons—the Melakans ask, “What may be this round weapon that
yet is sharp enough to kill us?” (Brown 152) (Apa namanya senjata yang bulat ini maka
dengan tajamnya maka it membunuh? 255)—says less about Melaka’s state of techno-
logical advancement than it appears. Firearms had already reached Southeast Asia.
When capturing Melaka Portuguese found a large stock of artillery in the city.113 The
Ottomans took part in curbing European activities in the Indian Ocean and in
Southeast Asia by sending firearms or the technology to fellow-Muslims elsewhere in
the world, including Aceh.114 The surprise is a narrative strategy to anticipate Melaka’s
imminent fall.
The Portuguese attack at the end of Sejarah Melayu is preceded by narratives of
Melakans’ cunning ability to turn the tables on foreigners, even Muslim missionaries
from the Middle East. Portuguese success is not a given. In Sejarah Melayu, the
Portuguese attack twice before capturing Melaka, their victory attributed to the sultan’s
foolishness. The text nostalgically glorifies the past to offer a lesson on true patriotism.
Critical of the cowardly and selfish behavior of several of the Malay players, it is
ambivalent about the reigning Sultan Ahmad, who favors young men instead of lis-
tening to wise old counselors. After Melaka’s defeat, his father had him murdered and
reoccupied the throne in exile. Insofar as it holds lessons for future generations, the
text recuperates nostalgia, turning it into forceful resistance. There were numerous
attempts at recovering Melaka; the Portuguese did not have a completely secure hold.
The naming of the Portuguese as “Franks” or “Feringgi” in Malay places this episode
in a Middle Eastern history of invasion by crusaders; elsewhere they are called by the
more precise term of “Portugis.” This historical sense is quite deliberate, evidenced by
an episode of intertexuality where texts, or stories, guide state affairs. Sejarah Melayu
begins with the Alexander story of world unity, a universalism promised by Islam,
112
Unger 1948: 133–5; Unger translates the Spanish letter into Dutch. Maurice accuses the Portuguese
of encroaching of their mutual liberty (libertad/vrijheid) and turning them into slaves (esclavos/slaven). For
how the Dutch compared themselves to Native Americans as both enslaved to Spain, see Schmidt 2001.
113
John Crawfurd’s entry on “arms” summarizes evidence of Southeast Asian use of firearms in contem-
porary Portuguese accounts (Crawfurd 1856: 22–3).
114
Inalcık 1975: 195–217; Chase 2003: 136. For Ottoman-Portuguese rivalry in the Red Sea and Indian
Ocean, see Özbaran 1995: 55–70; Özbaran 1994; Oliver and Atmore, 2001: 123–7; and Casale 2010.
but it ends with this unity disrupted. On the eve of the Portuguese war, another Islamic
text about past conflict is brought up. As the Malays prepare for the Portuguese attack,
someone suggests reading a war story—an old text—in hopes they benefit from it. They
ask for Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah, but the sultan offers another tale, Hikayat Amir
Hamzah. The people insist on their choice—challenged by the sultan who fears their
bravery falls short of Muhammad Hanafiah. A. Samad Ahmad argues that the sultan
knows the episode in Hikayat Amir Hamzah where Amir Hamzah and his son prince
Rastam fight the Portuguese who attack Khursand (in modern-day Saudi Arabia).115
They repel the invaders, chasing them back to Portugal where Rastam is first captured
but later rescued by Amir Hamzah. Defeating the Portuguese, they take over the city.
Amir Hamzah marries the king’s daughter to Rastam, converts the Portuguese into
Islam, and forces them to pay tribute. Both texts join Hikayat Iskandar to form an early
core of Islamic epics transmitted to Southeast Asia. Sejarah Melayu expects readers
familiar with this body of texts to connect the two wars with the Portuguese.
Sejarah Melayu’s intertextuality—where Arabic stories are borrowed and assimi-
lated into Malay cultural heritage—means that it already had a history in which to
place the Portuguese. Religious differences and conflicts were imported from earlier
religious wars. But Sejarah Melayu can be critical of foreign Muslims: in one vignette a
certain holy Maulana Sadar Jahan, whose title Mawlānā (‫ )موالنا‬signifies a religious
leader, criticizes a local courtier for drunkenness, but the drunk embarrasses him by
implying that his motives in coming to Melaka are mercenary (248–9). Rather than a
binary discourse, the paradoxical conflation does not allow for essentialized natures.
The work was composed in exile and subsequently revised at the exiled court estab-
lished in Johor. In their efforts to recover Melaka, Johor was willing to make strategic
alliances with Europeans, recapturing Melaka with Dutch help in 1641. Conflict had
not yet hardened along East–West boundaries. Sejarah Melayu’s history, one it shares
with the Portuguese, is multi-layered. Behind the comparison to religiously-motivated
wars of the Middle Ages is an earlier late antique worldview from cosmopolitan
Alexandria in the form of the Alexander Romance. This worldview was available to
frame Melaka’s fall for both the Portugese and for Melakans. For the Portuguese, the
comparison to Alexander’s crossing of boundaries in his Indian campaigns showcased
their own unprecedented conquest of Melaka. Melakans, however, turned to a darker
interpretation of Alexander. Seeing a cautionary tale in him, Sejarah Melayu warns of
overweening ambition. Both sides deployed Alexander as a frame for “India,” but the
frame wavers between the celebration of boundlessness—in the image of Alexander as
the universal sovereign—and the bitter restraint of limits.
Conclusion
In its boundary-crossing hero, Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain offers a universal sovereign
who united East and West. His conquests from Iberia to China unifies the world into a
Ahmad 1987: ix.
115
global community of Muslims. But Iskandar establishes sovereignty largely not by

military means but through the spiritual persuasion of the prophet Khidir. This con-
version integrates the world’s peoples into a pan-Islamic kinship. So capacious and
universal is this community of Islam that it can include the most apparently outré of
beings, including even non-human jinns, or fairies, where difference can in the instant
of a shahādah morph into similitude. Thus, too, Iskandar recognizes kinship relations
with Muslims avant la lettre in the far peripheries, who in act though not yet in name
belong to Iskandar’s universal empire. This universalism manifests itself too in the
image of Iskandar as technocrat. The accounts of his awesome machines, automata
that overgo even the terrifying war elephants of India, incorporate Arabo-Persian
assimilation of Hellenistic science. In one of the most iconic episodes of his scientific
explorations, the diving bell, Iskandar’s drive for universal sovereignty even receives
divine sanction.
However, Hikayat Iskandar’s ending—Iskandar taught a lesson on mortality in the
episode of the land of darkness—reimposes limits on what initially appears to be an
unbounded empire. François Polignac has suggested that it is the interplay of univer-
salism and limits that characterizes the romance Alexander. We see this interplay not
only in the Hikayat Iskandar but also in its most paradigmatic reading in Sejarah
Melayu, where the cosmopolitan character of Melaka, in its repeated translationes,
finally reaches the limit defined by Portuguese incursions. While not yet hardened into
East–West conflicts, the link made to Middle Eastern medieval histories render the
Portuguese unassimilable, even while other Europeans were accepted as allies. This
particular role played by the Portuguese would be repeated in later seventeenth-
century Malay texts influenced by Hikayat Iskandar, namely Hikayat Aceh, discussed
in Chapter 8, and Hikayat Hang Tuah, discussed in Chapter 10, when it had become a
common trope. As with Hikayat Iskandar, these later texts, under its influence, display
the characteristic marks of Alexandrian universalism. In Southeast Asia where foreign
trade relations existed for centuries, the universalisms offered by Islam and its hero
Iskandar found a ready audience, testified by the repeated returns to the universalist
Iskandar in later Malay literature.

Islamic Alexanders in Southeast Asia

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Islamic Alexanders in Southeast Asia

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2

Islamic Alexanders in Southeast

Conquest of Constantinople consolidated Ottoman control over eastern Mediterranean

and Asia, while Pierre Briant examines a pan-European Enlightenment discourse

Familiar Strangers in the Peripheries

Figure 2.1 Opening illuminated pages of Hikayat Iskandar Dhulkarnain, copied by Enci’

conqueror into an “inventor and sage.”49 Episodes of technological marvels preserve

Pirate and Emperor

Pliny 1938–63: 2.192–3, book 4.13.94–5.

This is also among woodcut images from the Nuremberg Chronicle.

The first example is an episode from Pseudo-Callisthenes’ epistolary debate in

From admired conqueror to object of pity, Iskandar’s worldly achievements cannot

Alexandrian Translatio imperii in the Malay Annals

With several descendants, Alexander’s legacy transfers to several states. By tracing

Anushirwan, transliterated as Nusyirwan in Malay. This marriage depicts the joining

Alexander in Melaka’s Fall

by his successors and by Romans and in Renaissance revivals down to as late as

A greater Alexander, Manuel unites disparate worlds. Sliding from conquest to

as imitating Alexander but as violating traditions he established. An Arab chronicler

global community of Muslims. But Iskandar establishes sovereignty largely not by

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