The Wiles of Creation: Philosophy, Fiction, and the ‘Ajā’ib Tradition

In the introduction to the Arabic cosmology of marvels, ‘Ajāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt (‘Marvels of Creation and Rarities of Existence’), Zakariyyāʾ al-Qazwīnī (d. 682/1283) raises the issue of veracity in the narration of the wondrous. Central to al-Qazwīnīʾs exposition of the strange and marvellous is a sustained interest in the pleasure produced through the narration of elegant tales. Despite this aesthetic awareness, al-Qazwīnī returns repeatedly to the question of authenticity. For al-Qazwīnī, the estimation of these wondrous accounts also depends on their relative truth-value. This article traces the tension between the fictive and the real by exploring some of the Greek, Arabic, and Persian antecedents to al-Qazwīnīʾs phenomenology of creation.