Critical Study of wonder book writing tradition in the Islamic World; A case study on Zakaria Qazvini's ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt

Wonder book writing has been of customary traditions in Islamic historiography. Wonder book writing first emerged as one type of Islamic geography and cosmology and in fact, it is the common product of natural history and geography. ʿAjāʾib Namah could be considered as unique forms of encyclopedias that are remarkable in terms of literary, cosmology, geography and natural history. In ʿAjāʾib Namah real thing is usually interlace with the unreal and phenomena are explained in a literary and exaggerated way without research and criticism. Multiple ʿAjāʾib Namah has been written in Islamic civilization. One of the most complete and comprehensive among them is Zakaria Qazvini's ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt. In this work, Qazvini has appeared as a natural scientist and has explained common scientific topics. The key question is whether ʿAjāʾib Namah could be considered as scientific works? This study by using the analytical-comparative method explains that ʿAjāʾib Namah belongs to that part of the Islamic knowledge system that is opposed to rational-critical and empirical approaches. In other words, considering the text of Qazvini's work and other similar works indicates that to what extent the concept of science in the Islamic world from the sixth century onwards has changed and degenerated from the one that Islamic scholars contemplated in the third and fourth centuries. According to the findings of this study, wonder book writing is the product of the science degeneration period in Islamic civilization and getting away from rational, critical, empirical and observational approaches.