In certain academic circles, it is highly controversial to locate race, racism or racists in the premodern context. Since the 1960s, however, and especially in recent years, a broad range of scholars have attempted to discuss race in distant times, sometimes even in ancient Greek texts. Much of this work (though not all) has focused solely within the boundaries of what we consider to be modern Europe. Relying on the recent contributions of David Nirenberg, Travis Zadeh and many others, this intellectual history takes the earliest extant Arabic version of Zakarīyā al-Qazwīnī’s thirteenth century encyclopedia ʻAjāʼib al-Makhluqat wa-gharāʼib al-mawjūdāt (referred to as Wonders and Rarities) as one example of how we might discuss race in a context that is both premodern and non-Western while remaining sensitive to the legacy of Orientalism. More specifically, this paper is a preliminary attempt to answer the question: Can Qazwīnī’s racial project be understood through special attention to categories like wonder, the marvellous, and the monstrous? The interconnected discursive work that race and wonder do for Qazwīnī will be explored through a few foundational examples, namely the story of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf’s “Jewish” knowledge of angelic hierarchy, the strict genealogical boundaries between the angel subdivisions and their jinn brethren, the islands of the Chinese Sea and the Mediterranean, the tales of the black-skinned Zanj, various racialized animals and magical creatures, brief information on animal husbandry, and the story the Prophet Noah’s refusal to allow Og the Giant onto the ark. It concludes with a brief discussion of the stakes of discussing race in the premodern, non-Western world.