The Ethics of Wonder: The Persian Qazvini Corpus (1300–1632)

Abstract

My dissertation is a long-view analysis of Zakariya ibn Muhammad al-Qazvini’s Persian ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt, comprising over thirty manuscripts produced in Iran from 1300 to 1632. Through four case studies, it traces the scantly studied corpus from its inception as an unillustrated text to its emergence as the most popular illustrated version of Qazvini’s cosmography in the Islamic world. I argue that the Persian ʿAjāʾib, which contains twenty-nine chapters not found in any Arabic version of Qazvini’s text, expanded possibilities of ethical cultivation for its readers and centered human agency in its cosmic system. The first chapter examines the Persian text as a work written by Qazvini himself, positioning it as an equal counterpart to the Arabic version and situates the earliest extant codex within the context of its creation in Ilkhanid Iran. Interpreting the Persian ʿAjāʾib text as a complete, intentionally constructed cosmography enables a different reading of Qazvini and prompts a reconsideration of his oeuvre. Chapter Two focuses on the dissemination and popularity of the Persian ʿAjāʾib corpus as it becomes an illustrated book predominately made in the commercial manuscript capital of Turkmen Shiraz from 1470–1490. Produced for a “commercial market,” these manuscripts offer insights into the entangled interests and imaginations of artistic, intellectual, and administrative communities of the late fifteenth century. In my third chapter, I explore how the depiction of wonder and rarity in the early Safavid period developed alongside contemporary aesthetic theories to produce pedagogical tools for readers. In a 1545 illustrated manuscript, visual training exercises are derived from Neoplatonic philosophy and Sufi concepts on the senses and soul transformation, as described in Qazvini’s text, to provide a method of intellectual and moral education. The final chapter looks at a later Safavid manuscript created in 1632. I argue that its artist(s) endeavored to revitalize the knowledge found in the Persian ʿAjāʾib by drawing on contemporary textual and visual references. Through the incorporation of tropes from single-page paintings, other illustrated literary traditions, and new foreign media, Qazvini’s cosmography fostered novel forms of cultivation within a rapidly expanding global environment.