The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Animals: Signs of the Creator and His Attributes in Medieval Islamic Encyclopaedias and Zoological Works

While pre-modern Christian theologians often disdained theoretical curiosity as a form of temptation, for medieval Muslim scholars, theoretical inquiry, especially regarding natural objects, carried a rather positive connotation. This attitude found support in the underlying idea that the natural world is a depository of signs of the creator that needs to be interpreted and understood so as to achieve the knowledge of God. In this article, I aim to examine how some Muslim scholars developed this theoretical attitude in the context of encyclopaedias and works of natural science. I will show the extent to which they applied this theological approach to the treatment of nonhuman animals. To this end, I will focus on two main texts, namely The Book of Animals, the famous zoological treatise by Abū ʿUṯmān al-Ǧāḥiẓ, and The Book of Wonders in Creation, by Zakarīyāʾ ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī. Commenting on relevant passages concerning small, weak, and dangerous animals, I will show how these were considered especially pertinent to their purposes thanks to the subtle and astonishing ways by which they were able to signify the creator and his divine attributes. This is the written version of the paper presented at the Kölner Mediaevistentagung in 2019.