"The wonders and curiosities of the Islamic imagination await
discovery by a new generation of readers in this superb and very
enjoyable book by Travis Zadeh." -Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel
Prize in Literature The astonishing biography of one of the world's
most influential books. During the thirteenth century, the Persian
naturalist and judge Zakariyya' Qazwini authored what became one of
the most influential works of natural history in the world: Wonders
and Rarities. Exploring the dazzling movements of the stars above,
the strange minutiae of the minerals beneath the earth, and
everything in between, Qazwini offered a captivating account of the
cosmos. With fine paintings and leading science, Wonders and
Rarities inspired generations as it traveled through madrasas and
courts, unveiling the magical powers of nature. Yet after
circulating for centuries, first in Arabic and Persian, then in
Turkish and Urdu, Qazwini's compendium eventually came to stand as
a strange, if beautiful, emblem of medieval ignorance. Restoring
Qazwini to his place as a herald of the rare and astonishing,
Travis Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the
history of Islamic philosophy, science, and literature. From the
Mongol conquests to the rise of European imperialism and Islamic
reform, Zadeh shows, wonder provided an enduring way to conceive of
the world-at once constituting an affective reaction, an aesthetic
stance, a performance of piety, and a cognitive state. Yet through
the course of colonial modernity, Qazwini's universe of marvels
helped advance the notion that Muslims lived in a timeless world of
superstition and enchantment, unaware of the western hemisphere or
the earth's rotation around the sun. Recovering Qazwini's ideas and
his reception, Zadeh invites us into a forgotten world of thought,
where wonder mastered the senses through the power of reason and
the pleasure of contemplation.
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