ʿAjab

Categorized as Terms

 ʻAjab

Vivek Gupta

Related Terms:

  • Al-Buraq (the Prophet Muhammad’s human-headed flying steed)
  • Talisman (object ascribed with religious and/or magical powers)
  • Waqwaq (mythical tree with human-headed fruit)

Related Khamseen Videos:

Sascha Crasnow, “Saba Taj’s Interstellar Uber // Negotiations with God: Queer Articulations in Contemporary Islamic Art,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 20 May 2021.

Christiane Gruber, “A Safavid Painting of the Prophet Muhammad’s Mi‘raj,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 28 August 2020.

References:

Berlekamp, Persis. Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Gupta, Vivek. “How Persianate Is It? A World-Making Book Transcreated from Iraq to India.” In Persian Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World, edited by Matthew Canepa, 238–56. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2023.

Harb, Lara. Arabic Poetics and Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Rührdanz, Karin. “Zakariyyā al-Qazwīni on the Inhabitants of the Supralunar World: From the First Persian Version (659/1260–61) to the Second Arabic Redaction (678/1279–80).” In The Intermediate Worlds of Angels: Islamic Representations of Celestial Beings in Transcultural Contexts, edited by Sara Kuehn et al, 384–402. Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2019. 

Saliba, George. “The Function of Mechanical Devices in Medieval Islamic Society,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 441/1 (1985): 141–51.

Zadeh, Travis. Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book that Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023.

Citation:

Vivek Gupta, “ʻAjab,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 24 September 2024.

Vivek Gupta researches connected book histories across South, Central, and West Asia (ca. 1200-present). Currently, he is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London. From 2020 to 2023, he served as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Cambridge, where he continues to co-direct (with Suzanne Reynolds) a research and exhibition project at the Fitzwilliam Museum on Hindustani Airs: Music, Pleasure, and Cultural Exchange in Courtly Lucknow.Since 2020, he also has collaborated with several organizations in India to produce the webinar, From Konkan to Coromandel: Cultures and Societies of the Deccan World. His first book, Worldshaping Wonders: Books and Visual Knowledge in Hindustan, is currently under contract.