Although some Islamic manuscripts featuring depictions of animal figures in the period between 700-1500 CE have been referred to as proto-bestiaries, Islamic book culture does not include a discrete generic branch that directly correlates with the Western, Christian bestiary. Nonetheless, the overwhelming influence of Central Asian figuration upon Arabic and Persianate manuscripts, particularly during the Ilkhanid (1256-1335) and Ottoman (beginning 1299) periods, engendered a surge in zoological depictions in the context of the Islamic book. Some notable artwork of animals is found found in compendiums of natural history and lore, including al-Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (8th century CE) and al-Damīrī’s Ḥayāt al-ḥayawān al-kubrā (c.1371 CE). Notably, the well-known illustrations of these works were often produced decades or centuries after the original compositions, such as Biblioteca Ambrosiana’s exquisite Kitāb al-Ḥayawān of Syrian provenance dated to the 14th century, now an icon of the medieval Islamic bestiary. My paper explores in what capacity we can consider later-illustrated iterations of al-Sufi’s (d.986) Ṣuwar al-kawākib (The book of fixed stars) a bestiary, or a collection of astral beasts which serve as a way to think through God-consciousness, both in its authoritative taxonomy of created beings and its page-mirroring drawings techniques that allow the reader to view earth from heaven and heaven from earth. As a case study, I examine Library of Congress, Arabic MS 16 (QB23 .S84) (dated 1417) as a fifteenth-century example of these objectives. I argue that the ingenuity in book design, which breaks from the aesthetics of preceding astronomical works, contributes to its role as an object that facilitates mysticism, not merely communicates scientific truths. Further, like most of the European bestiaries which have traceable undercurrents of Christian evangelism despite their pagan Aristotelian lineage, books of animals in Persian and Arabic bear the anxiety of having been translated, at least in part, from pre-Islamic Greek texts. However, whereas European bestiaries are clearly situated in a post-lapsian world, as stated by their authors and compilers, medieval Islamic authors were not beholden to the perennial fall of creation or that the natural world was somehow imperfect. Rather than possessing unequivocal dominion over the animal kingdom, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, human beings were decentralized from the narrative of Islamic cosmology medieval books of natural history. In the fifteenth-century Ṣuwar al-kawākib, the human reader can experience this decentralization through interaction with the visceral page.