“Like al-Qazwīnī himself, Travis Zadeh has written a deliciously baggy tome, full of delights and diversions in its tour of the cosmic horizons. This is a book to get lost in, whether one wants to or not.” —Nile Green, Los Angeles Review of Books 

“As Zadeh concludes, reformers and modernists have closed the rich and varied archive revealed in Wonders and Rarities…In this beautifully written and engaging text, Zadeh takes his readers back to the world of surprise and enchantment that preceded this closure.”—Malise Ruthven, Financial Times 

“This book about a book, like the book it describes, is a rare and marvelous thing.” —Justin Marozzi, The Spectator 

During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyāʾ Qazwīnī 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, Qazwīnī offered a captivating account of the cosmos. Wonders and Rarities inspired generations as it traveled through madrasas and courts, unveiling the magical powers of nature. But Qazwīnī’s compendium eventually came to stand as a strange, if beautiful, emblem of medieval ignorance. 

Restoring Qazwīnī 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. 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, Qazwīnī’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 Qazwīnī’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.

"As Zadeh concludes, reformers and modernists have closed the rich and varied archive revealed in Wonders and Rarities…In this beautifully written and engaging text, Zadeh takes his readers back to the world of surprise and enchantment that preceded this closure." - Financial Times

"Like al-Qazwīnī himself, Travis Zadeh has written a deliciously baggy tome, full of delights and diversions in its tour of the cosmic horizons. This is a book to get lost in, whether one wants to or not. Zadeh describes the ʿAjaʾib al-Makhlūqāt as containing a ‘world within a book.’ In his own Wonders and Rarities, he has managed something similar himself." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"This book about a book, like the book it describes, is a rare and marvelous thing…In his passionate and erudite mission to restore Qazwini to centre stage, [Zadeh] has given readers a book filled with its own wonder and marvels. Like his hero, he well understands the most important thing: ‘What matters is a good story.’" - The Spectator

"Wonders and Rarities has been studied by art historians in particular, but Travis Zadeh sets it in the context of wider Islamic thought…Indeed, he faces the mammoth task of mastering the same range of disciplines as Qazwini himself, from alchemy to botany, philosophy, theology and zoology. These feats are themselves worthy of wonder." - London Review of Books

"A study of the wondrous, marvelous, and strange in the Islamicate context…This book contributes to our understanding of an intellectually vibrant world full of wondrous anecdotes, magic, science, and poetry." - Reading Religion

"A wide-ranging and enchanting study…Zadeh has traced the history of al-Qazwini’s books in the centuries after their author’s death, their abbreviations, expansions, imitations and glorious illustrations." - Literary Review