When he completed a response poem called *The Alexandrine Mirror* to Niẓāmī’s *Alexander Book* (1202), Amīr Khusrow (d.1325) transformed the arc Niẓāmī had traced from Alexander’s imperial adventuring to his humbling as a prophet. In Khusrow’s re-telling Alexander was a “divinely inspired” Sufi king, not a prophet. This freed Khusrow to turn Alexander into a philosopher-saint-king engineer and patron of engineers. It also allowed him to turn Alexander into an exemplum for his patron Sultan ‘Alā al-Dīn Khalajī of Delhi who had styled himself “the Second Alexander”.
Early in the poem Khusrow tells a striking tale concerning a man who doubted the literalness of the Prophet’s Ascension and was humbled for it. The plot, however, derives wholly from the *Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha* where it concerns a Brahman’s experience of the relativity of space and time. How, by this tale, did Khusrow seek to prescribe the proper ethical response to his poem’s unprecedented equation of Sunni royal authority with engineering? Why did he set in Syria a tale his immediate Indian readers would have recognised as concerning a Brahman? This paper will make a case for the monologic submission to Sufi royal reason in Khusrow’s poem of the Brahman of early kalām or Islamic speculative theology and of the Advaitic monist Sanskrit tradition available to Khusrow in what were probably vernacular oral forms.
