Al-Qazwini’s Wonders of Creation (ʿAjā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt, Persia)

• A celebrated Islamic cosmography by Zakariya al-Qazwini, richly illustrated with fantastical beings, celestial spheres, marvels of nature, and symbolic creatures—uniting observation, faith, science, and storytelling into an illustrated manuscript of the cosmos.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Wonders of Creation is a manuscript of staggering epistemic plurality—a poetic inventory of stars and serpents, angels and islands, gemstones and cosmological hierarchies. For Foucault, who was always fascinated by the archaeology of knowledge, this manuscript is not simply a compendium—it is a pre-modern episteme made visible: a world ordered not by analytic clarity but by curiosity, affect, and metaphysical intimacy.

But when read through The Care of the Self, it becomes something even more profound: a mirror-cosmos for the ethical subject. The text does not discipline the reader with rigid taxonomies; it seduces them into wonder, and in so doing, calls forth an aesthetics of existence grounded in attention, receptivity, and awe.

Al-Qazwini’s approach—layering the observable with the imaginary, the empirical with the miraculous—is a Foucauldian gesture par excellence. It resists disciplinary reductionism. Instead, it offers a cosmopoetic modality of truth: where knowing the world is inseparable from shaping oneself in relation to it. Each creature, constellation, and elemental tale becomes a site for subjectivation—for becoming someone who lives in harmony with divine pattern and earthly variability.

This is not “science” in the modern sense, but rather cosmic ethics: the care of the self through attunement to creation. Foucault tells us that the ancient ethical subject was formed not through conformity to law, but by internalizing rhythms, symbolic forces, and cosmoi. Al-Qazwini offers just such a practice—encoded not in commandments but in metaphorical multiplicities: hybrid beasts, moon palaces, underwater kingdoms, moral allegories in avian form.

The self who engages with the Wonders is invited to dwell within what Foucault calls an “ontology of actuality”—one where the world is not fixed, but ever-opening, and where the individual refines their ethical presence through practices of curiosity, narrative ordering, and metaphysical humility.

In short, this is not just a manuscript; it is a technology of cosmological selfhood, inviting us to care for our place in the unfolding fabric of creation.