A wall of iron built to keep out Gog and Magog.
The two giants in London’s Lord Mayor’s Show surprisingly figure in the Koran too.
Sura 18 narrates briefly the travels of Dhu l-Qarnayn. The name means Two Horned, but it does not refer to Moses (who is often depicted with horns of power). Dhu l-Qarnayn has rather been taken to mean Alexander the Great. The name is explained in a narrative found in a sixth-century Syriac version and known as the Alexander Romance. “Thou hast caused horns to grown upon my head,” Alexander says to God, “so that I may crush the nations of the world.” Anyway, in the Koran, Dhu l-Qarnayn travels until he comes to “a people who could scarcely understand any speech”. They ask his help because “Yajuj and Majuj are wreaking mischief in the land”. Yajuj and Majuj are the Arabic names for Gog and Magog.
Dhu l-Qarnayn directs them to bring pieces of iron, which are melted in a fire to form a wall that can neither be scaled nor pierced, barring the way between two cliffs. This will keep out Yajuj and Majuj until the last days when they are let loose. Yajuj and Majuj are conceived here as peoples rather than giants. They will be so numerous, commentators on the Koran wrote, that they will drink up all the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. When they fire their arrows against God, he will kill them all in one night.
Until the last days, according to the ninth-century Persian exegete al-Tabari, Yajuj and Majuj will try to dig under the wall each night, when the sound of their tools may be heard. But God repairs the breaches they make before the morning.
This striking detail reminds me of a story by the 19th-century myth-making author George Macdonald, who in The Princess and the Goblin has subterranean goblins digging away each night to break through into the king’s house. I don’t know his sources; it may just be coincident.
As far as Islam is concerned, a reference to the iron wall against Yajuj and Majuj is made in a hadith that reports Mohammed hurrying into the room of Zainab bint Jahsh, his wife, and saying that so much (making a sign with his finger and thumb) had been opened up in the wall of Yajuj and Majuj. “Shall we all perish?” she asked. “Yes,” he replied, “if evil is widespread.”
There’s more of a moral there than in any legend of Gog and Magog familiar to the spectators at the Lord Mayor’s Show. I wonder how outsiders would judge our beliefs if they went by the emblems and traditions we perpetuate.
The write up was published on 15th September 2015 in the UK based Telegraph online edition.
[Christopher Howse writes about the world’s faiths, especially Christianity. He also comments frequently and blogs on the uses and abuses of the English language.]
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