Travis Zadeh’s Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos is a study of the wondrous, marvelous, and strange in the Islamicate context. There are various terms in Arabic (the Persian and Turkish words are borrowed from Arabic) to refer to this epistemology—this way of seeing the world, but also of structuring knowledge and experience (it is thus a scholarly method, too)—but the most commonplace expression of these concepts is the bipartite ‘ajīb wa-gharīb (the wondrous and the rare), or ‘ajā’ib wa-gharā’ib (wonders and rarities).
These two words appear in the title of the 13th-century book at the heart of Zadeh’s monograph, Zakariyyā’ al-Qazwīnī’s (d. 1283) ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt (translated by Zadeh as Wonders of things created and rarities of matters existent, or Wonders and Rarities for short). Zadeh’s book is a biography of al-Qazwīnī’s Wonders and Rarities, as he tells his readers (24). But he also uses it as a springboard to tell the story of the imbrication of wonder-writing, natural history, science, and the occult in premodern Islamic society, before secular modernity came to impose a strict binary between science and reason on the one hand, and religion on the other (21).
Like al-Qazwīnī’s Wonders and Rarities, Zadeh’s book is divided into three parts. Using al-Qazwīnī’s other major work, Āthār al-bilād wa-akhbār al-‘ibād (Remnants of the regions and reports of the righteous), as a sort of nexus from which he traces scholarly lineages and networks, the first part of Zadeh’s book offers a thorough account of the political, social, and intellectual context in which al-Qazwīnī studied and wrote. With vivid prose, Zadeh brings to life medieval Islamic centers like Baghdad and Mosul. To contextualize the breadth of al-Qazwīnī’s book, which blends philosophy and natural history with theology, Zadeh takes us on a journey through the systematization of Greek philosophy in the Islamicate world, first with Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037), and later with Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1209), to whom al-Qazwīnī could trace an intellectual lineage through Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. ca. 1264) (the focus of chapter 2). This development in philosophy coincided with the rise of the madrasa system (“the primary institution for educating the religious elite in law and theology”), facilitating the spread of these ideas (44).
As a result of these developments, by the late 11th and early 12th centuries “the broader epistemic boundaries that had once separated kalām, Islamic dialectical theology, from the tradition of Hellenistic philosophy, known in Arabic as falsafa, had begun to shift” (42). This is because theologians, who might have not been sympathetic to Greek falsafa, nonetheless found in it “a powerful means for describing… theological topics… through the language of science,” ultimately leading to “exposing the division between reason and revelation as a false dichotomy” (43). It is in the wake of this paradigm shift that al-Qazwīnī wrote his compendium.
The second, densest part of the book (chapters 4–6) can be considered a sort of guide to reading al-Qazwīnī’s Wonders and Rarities. Taking al-Qazwīnī’s text as a starting point, Zadeh provides a dizzying intellectual genealogy of the ideas al-Qazwīnī presents in his rather terse book. If al-Qazwīnī’s goal was “to distill sophisticated teachings of natural science into accessible form” (137), Zadeh undoes this distillation, and instead traces these ideas back to their origins—usually classic Greek texts as translated, discussed, and reworked in Arabic (but, notably, usually by scholars of Persian origin). Therefore, in this part Zadeh takes us on a joyride through texts by Ptolemy, Galen, Avicenna, the two Rāzīs—Abū Bakr (d. 925), the physician known in the Latin West as Rhazes, and Fakhr al-Dīn, the mystic and philosopher—and al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), among others, unraveling the dynamic genesis of the ideas presented in a rather matter-of-fact manner in al-Qazwīnī’s compendium.
If the second part of the book provides the precursory texts and debates that gave rise to al-Qazwīnī’s text and the arguments therein, the third part (chapters 7–9) traces the book’s afterlife in the Near East and beyond. For example, he shows how in the Ottoman context, the traditional conception of the world developed by early Arabic geographers like al-Mas‘ūdī (d. 956) and adopted by al-Qazwīnī is then adjusted to incorporate recently acquired knowledge about the New World that the Ottomans gathered from Christian sources, both written and oral. In this vein, the Coda provides a marvelous account of the text’s early reception by Orientalists in Europe, a welcome addition to the rising interest in nuancing our understanding how these Orientalists thought and studied, and how they interacted with dragomans and other travelers from the East.
It is worth reiterating Zadeh’s eloquent prose and deep erudition—not many would be able to pull this book off with such effortlessness. Despite this, the book’s audience seems uncertain to me. While the press seems to have a broader audience in mind as evidenced by, for example, limiting footnotes to the end of paragraphs (which makes it hard to track specific references in dense paragraphs) and referring to works using their translated rather than transliterated titles, the discussion often gets technical and hard to follow without at least some background knowledge of the Islamicate tradition. Conversely, sometimes background information is provided (e.g., an overview of the main Sunni legal schools on pages 60–62), but how much the non-specialist would get out of this information—or how useful it would be to them—remains to be seen. Another downside of the book is that it does not provide colored versions of the many images of illustrated manuscripts it includes (the e-book version also includes these images in greyscale). For “the written word can never capture the world it seeks to contain or evoke.” Yet, we may take this opportunity to develop our “faculty of the imagination,” which, “when finely exercised and disciplined, is a powerful force capable of summoning realms from the unseen, even perhaps something so remote as the distant past” (26).
Despite these relatively minor complaints, this book is a welcome addition to the growing number of publications on the notion of wonder in the Islamicate context. Read alongside these other works (most recently, Michelle Karnes’s Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World, University of Chicago Press, 2022 and Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2020), this book contributes to our understanding of an intellectually vibrant world full of wondrous anecdotes, magic, science, and poetry.
Tom Abi Samra is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.
Tom Abi Samra
Date Of Review:
June 29, 2023