Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos

Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos

Zadeh, Travis

Hardcover

IslamGeneral Middle Eastern HistoryGeneral World History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0674258452
ISBN13: 9780674258457
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr
Published: Jan 10 2023
Pages: 464
Weight: 1.96
Height: 1.61 Width: 6.59 Depth: 9.66
Language: English

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

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 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. 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, 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. 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, 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.

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