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Thanks, I find these issues really fascinating, and as you probably noticed I'm a big dork for scholarship on the emergence of Islam and the Qur'an.
In that regard have you read this awesome article about the background for the Qur'an's references to Zulqarnayn? "The Legend of Alexander the Great in the Qur'an," by van Bladel.
http://www.amazon.com/Quran-Histori...1872&sr=8-2&keywords=quran+historical+context
I highly recommend it, it explains a great deal about the story and its context in pre-Islamic Syriac texts, which you couldn't tell from the Qur'an alone. Wikiislam also has a good discussion of this subject.
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Dhul-Qarnayn_and_the_Alexander_Romance
This is one of the hottest areas of Islamic scholarship right now, showing how much of the Qur'an is premised on a Syriac linguistic, textual, and cultural substrate that later Muslim tradition no longer understood or remembered (because it was committed to the traditional Muslim narrative that the Qur'an was divinely revealed as an oral recitation to an illiterate prophet in the Hijaz, rather than arising as part of the literate Middle Eastern culture).
No I haven't, but thanks i'll definitely take a look.