Our Lord has ordered us to contemplate the wonders of the world.” Fusing the world of the impossible with the world of the merely strange-but-true, the style might best be filed under the words of one of his prologues: “Marvels are found in the most remote part of the sky and the earth. At the same time, these “wonders”-of legendary places, mythical people and wholly imagined events-make for good reading. Born in the year 1080 under the last of the Zirid kings, he was a merchant and a scholar who, in a 90-year lifetime, wrote on a variety of subjects in two works following the literary tradition called kutub al-‘aja’ib in Arabic, or “books of wonder”-a genre that he helped to define.Īs one might expect from the name, a “book of wonders” is not only what one sees and hears on one’s travels, but also what one could not have possibly seen because it did not then nor did it ever exist. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Suleiman ibn Rabi al-Qaysi, known more conveniently to posterity as Abu Hamid Al-Garnati and so named after his hometown of Granada (“Garnata”), sailed, caravanned, traded and trekked from the Arab West to the northern- and easternmost reaches of the Islamic world and beyond.
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