| Popis: |
We do not know much about the life of the eminent cosmographer of the Muslim Middle Ages. The biographic data is based to a large extent on his own remarks of autobiographic character and on postscripts by later copyists of the encyclopaedias widely popular in the world of Islam. Abu Yahyā Zakariyā’ ibn Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd al-Qazwīnī was born in Qazwīn, Persia about the year 1203. In spite of his nisba he originated from an Arab family – yet settled and assimilated in Persian Iraq for a long time. In 1233, after numerous travels in Mesopotamia and Syria he arrived in Damascus, where he dwelled permanently. The written tradition did not leave us any information about his earlier or later voyages. At some indefinite time Al-Qazwīnī held the post of qādī in Wāsit and Hilla in Iraq. It is not clearly known if he retained his ministry after the invasion of Mongol Hulagu’s army, though the work was dedicated to the well-known Baghdad lawyer at the Mongol court: ‘Atā Malik al-Ğuwaynī. Al-Qazwīnī died in 1283 in Damascus. In the same city he met the famous mystic Ibn ‛Arabī in 1233 and studied with Al-Abhārī. Al-Qazwīnī, an encyclopaedist of Persian descent and writing in Arabic was called Arab Pliny – a comparison undoubtedly justified by the extensive field of his studies and, unfortunately, a low level of his scientific criticism. He wrote two large works, sometimes considered to be the two parts of the same book, though published under independent titles: a) Kitāb āt̠ār al-bilād wa aḫbār al-‘ibād (Book of Monuments of the Lands and Knowledge about People) – geography. b) Kitāb ‘ağā’ib al-maḫlūqāt wa ġarā’ib al-mawğūdāt (Book of Wonders of the Creation and Singularities of the Existance) – cosmography. In this work we are interested in the latter book – apart from much mythical and legendary material, the book also includes a large number of descriptions of plants, minerals, animals, etc. The main body is a compilation of previous Arabic scientists (often lost or forgotten), but there seems to exist a lot of original material as well. As the age of Al-Qazwīnī (XIII century) was the time of the decline of science in the Middle East, Kitāb ‘ağā’ib al-maḫlūqāt is considered as one its last masterpieces. In his work Al-Qazwīnī describes more than 20 plants and their medical use along with some opinions of eminent scholars like Avicenna or Rhazes. The book is even more valuable as it gives the level of knowledge of an average Arabic reader of the time. The exact identification of some of the taxons is often impossible because of poor morphological descriptions of the plants and their medical use. |
