(The country of Waq Waq)
Waq Waq is a group of islands mentioned in ancient Arab heritage books , but there is no evidence as to whether they are imaginary or real. Most books specify their geographical location in the China Sea or the Indian Ocean .
Location and name
Some orientalists believe that (Waq-Waq Islands) is a name given by the Arabs to two different countries that were long frequented by their sailors and merchants. The first country is located in the Far East , and in the opinion of most orientalists it is a region located on the eastern coast of the Asian continent , north of China . This opinion was taken by the French orientalist Gabriel Fran and the Russian orientalist Ignatius Kratchkovsky . Some orientalists believe that the Asian country that the Arabs called (Waq-Waq Islands) was not part of the eastern coast of Asia, but rather the Japanese islands themselves. This opinion is believed by the Dutch orientalist Johannes Hendrik Kramers , who also believed that the Arabs called (Waq-Waq) the island of Madagascar (Malagasi) in the southeast of the African continent . [1] In one of the maps drawn by the Arab geographer Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Idrisi around the year 1154, the Waq Islands appear at the top of the map, that is, in the southern part of the Earth, which makes them closer to the location of present-day Madagascar.
Buzurg bin Shahriyar mentioned in his book “The Wonders of India: Land, Sea and Islands” that there are two valleys:
One of the historical issues that has not been resolved is the issue of the cuckoos. Unfortunately, until now, no one has studied this issue and revealed its truth, which makes the belief that the cuckoos are a mythical people a possible matter for those who read the stories told about them by sailors and sea merchants.
We do not find anything about them in any book other than this one except their mere name and fabricated stories far from the truth. Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamdani, the author of “Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan” (902 AD), noted in the stories narrated by sailors about them that there are two Waqs and two Waqs, where he said: “The Waqs of China are different from the Waqs of Yemen.”
Waq Waq Yemen refers to Waq Waq of the South, that is, East Africa to the south of Yemen, and their homeland on the map of Sharif al-Idrisi is the far south of Africa. As for the story of Ibn Lakis mentioned above, it corresponds to the land of China, to the west.
Who are the Waq Waq of Yemen? Where are they from, when did they come to Africa, and where did they settle?
- Buzrak bin Shahriar
While some believe that Waq Waq is just a color that does not exist, as the Arabs used to call it “the impossible color.” It was said that the reason for the name is due to trees that bear this name, whose fruits resemble the head of a woman with long, hanging hair, and when the fruit ripens and falls to the ground, the air passes over it and it makes a sound that says “Waq Waq.” The Arab traveler Ibn Battuta mentioned the land of Waq Waq, where he said that its name was taken from the Chinese language , as the Chinese used to describe the country known today as Japan as the land of “Waku Waku.”
The Dutch orientalist Michiel Jan Khoe suggested that the origin of the word, which he interpreted as the Cantonese name for Japan , was identified by Gabriel Frane as Madagascar , Sumatra , or Indonesia . Tom Hoogervorst argued that the Malagasy word vahoak, meaning "people, clan, tribe," was derived from the Malay word awak-awak, "people, crew." Ann Komar agreed with Hoogervorst that Wakwak was Indonesia, as mentioned in the history of the ancient Indonesian attack on the east coast of Africa.
Waq Waq in heritage books
In the Arabic versions, the famous Waq Waq Island is located in the China Sea. It is ruled by a queen and its population is entirely female: this is what is shown in Al-Qazwini’s manuscripts , Wonders of Creation and Oddities of Existence , as well as in his book, Athar al-Bilad wa Akhbar al-Ibad, where the queen appears surrounded by her female servants.
Abu Bakr al-Razi said about al-Waq Waq:
“It is a country with so much gold that its people make chains for their dogs and collars for their monkeys out of gold, and they bring shirts woven from gold. ”
Ibn Khordadbeh mentioned in his book Al-Masalik wal-Mamalik Al-Waq Waq twice:
«
In the east of China, there is the land of the cuckoo, and it has so much gold that its people make chains for their dogs and collars for their monkeys out of gold, and they bring shirts woven with gold for sale, and good ebony cuckoos .
What comes in this eastern sea from China is silk, frankincense, kimchao, musk, aloes, saddles , sable, carnelian, silbanum, cinnamon, and galangal, and from cuckoos gold and ebony.
Musa bin Mubarak Al-Sirafi narrated , saying:
“He entered this country and a woman ruled it, and he saw her on a bed naked, with a crown on her head, and with her were four thousand naked virgin maids. ”
Al -Masoudi narrated :
“There is a tree in it from which grows a plant like apricot, and from it female slaves are born who cling to their hair and each one of them cries out, ‘Waq waq.’ If they cut their hair and separate them from the tree, they die. It is said that there is a lot of gold on this island. These islands surround Jabal al-Fath, which is inhabited by deformed blacks who block people’s paths and eat them. None of the neighbors enter the islands of this sea. Talking about its inhabitants and about the island of the Antichrist is like a story, so great is the Creator. ”
Al-Masoudi also mentioned in his book Akhbar Al-Zaman :
“Among the things that resemble the creation of man is his mother, who is called Waq Waq. She is a large tree-like creature because of her hair. She has hands and vaginas like women’s vaginas and colors. They never cease to cry out, Waq Waq. If one of them is cut off, she falls dead and does not speak. ”
The word “Waq Waq” was mentioned in the narration of Abdullah bin Amr bin Al-Aas, where he said:
“The world was created in five forms: in the form of a bird; with its head, chest, wings and tail. The head is Mecca, Medina and Yemen; the chest is Syria and Egypt; the right wing is Iraq; behind Iraq is a nation called Waq and behind Waq is a nation called Waq Waq. Behind that are nations that no one knows except God Almighty. The left wing is Sindh, behind Sindh is India; behind India is a nation called Nasik and behind Nasik is a nation called Mansik. Behind that are nations that no one knows except God Almighty. The tail is from the dove to the setting of the sun, and the worst thing about birds is the tail. ”
In the book of countries by Ibn al-Faqih:
“The statement about the seas and their encirclement of the earth. He said: The seas are four: The Great Sea, which there is no sea in the world larger than it. It extends from the Maghreb to Al-Qulzum until it reaches Waq Waq of China, and Waq Waq of China is different from Waq Waq of Yemen, because bad gold comes out of Waq Waq of Yemen. This sea extends from Al-Qulzum to Wadi Al-Qura until it reaches Berber and Oman, and it passes to Al-Daybal and Multan until it reaches Jabal Al-Sunf in China.”
In the book of paths and kingdoms by Al-Bakri :
“After this is a sea whose bottom cannot be comprehended or whose depth cannot be controlled. Ships cross it in two months by a good wind. There is no sea larger than it in all the seas that come from the ocean, nor is it more powerful. In its breadth are the lands of Waq-Waq, and they are female slaves who carry trees hanging by their hair. They have breasts and vaginas like women’s vaginas and beautiful bodies. They never cease to cry out, Waq-Waq. If they are cut off from the trees that carry them, they stay for a day and part of another day, then they perish. Sometimes people have intercourse with them in the most fragrant and delicious way. The lands of Waq-Waq are not inhabited by humans. Only the people of ships come to it in scarcity. It is the most fragrant land, and it has fruits and vegetables that are not known anywhere else. It is not known what is more delicious to eat and more pleasant to smell. ”
Shihab al-Din al-Abshihi mentioned in his book Al-Mustatraf fi Kul Fun Mustatraf :
“And from it is the island of Waq, behind a mountain called Istifion, inside the southern sea. It is said that this island was ruled by a woman, and that some travelers reached it and entered it and saw this queen, sitting on a bed, and on her head was a crown of gold, and around her were four hundred maidservants, all of them virgins. And on this island are wonders, a tree resembling a walnut tree, and the best of the shanbar, and it carries a load in the form of a human being, and when it ends, a sound is heard from it that is understood as Waq Waq, then it falls. And this island is full of gold, so it was said that the chains of their tents and the leashes and collars of their dogs are made of gold..”
Al-Idrisi mentioned in his book “Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq al-Afaq” :
“This tenth part of the first region, which is the end of the inhabited world from the east, and no one knows what is behind it, includes the Chinese Sea, called the Sea of Sankhi. Some people call it the Sea of the Kind, and its head and beginning are from the surrounding sea, called there the Sea of Asphalt, because its water is turbid and its wind is stormy, and darkness remains over it most of the time. This Asphalt Sea connects to the surrounding sea, which is connected to the lands of Gog and Magog, to what is below it, which is adjacent to the empty land in the north, and it connects to the Sea of Darkness, which is also connected to the west, as we have drawn. This sea also connects from the south to the islands of Waq Waq and the Sea of Serpents to the sea surrounding the earth in the south, as we have narrated, and we have brought it drawn by the power and assistance of God.”
Ibn Khaldun mentioned in his book, History of Ibn Khaldun :
“They said: And from this ocean also flows from the east and thirteen degrees north of the equator, a great, wide sea that passes a little south until it reaches the first region, then it passes through it westward until it ends in the fifth part of it in the lands of Abyssinia and Zanj and in the lands of Bab al-Mandab from it, four thousand leagues from its beginning, and it is called the Chinese, Indian, and Abyssinian sea. And upon it from the south is the lands of Zanj and the lands of the Berbers, which Imru’ al-Qais mentioned in his poetry, and they are not from the Berbers, who are the tribes of the Maghreb, then the land of Mogadishu, then the land of Safala and the land of Waq Waq and other nations, after which there is nothing but deserts and emptiness. And upon it from the north is China from its beginning, then India, then Sindh, then the coasts of Yemen from al-Ahqaf and Zabid and others, then the lands of Zanj at its end, and after them Abyssinia. ”
Ibn Abdul-Muneim Al-Himyari mentioned in his book Al-Rawd Al-Mu’tar fi Khabar Al-Aqtar that:
“The land of Waq Waq is connected to the land of Safala, and in it are two lowly cities, and its inhabitants are few due to the narrowness of its life and the turbidity of its livelihood, and between them is a large village called Daghragha, and they are blacks with ugly faces and deformed creation, and their speech is a kind of whistle, and they are naked and do not cover themselves with anything, and few enter them, and their food is whale and shells and tortoise meat, and the islands of Waq Waq are connected to them, and each one of these countries is on a large creek, and no trade goes out from these, and they have no ships or animals, and the islands of Waq Waq are unknown beyond them, and perhaps the people of China reach them in scarcity, and they are several islands with no people in them. And I saw [20] in another place that in the middle of the ocean are the lands of Waq Waq and the places where the spears grow, and the nation of Waq Waq is a camel of large trees hanging by its hair and it has breasts and vaginas like vaginas, and the women and bodies are beautiful, and they do not cease to cry Waq Waq, and if it is cut from the trees that carry it, it stays for a day and part of a day and then perishes, And perhaps people have intercourse with them in the most fragrant and delicious way. And the land of Waq Waq is not inhabited by humans, only the rarest ship owners come to it, and it is the most fragrant land, and it has dates and fruits that are not known elsewhere and what they are is not known, the most delicious food and the most delicious smell, and next to them is a marine nation that resembles beautiful women, with smooth hair and slender breasts, and they are called the daughters of the water, they have a laugh and a laugh and speech that is not understood, and one of the mariners gave birth to a boy from one of them while he was confident of her, then he thought after her birth that she would become attached to her son and not leave him, so he released her from her bonds, but she ignored him and fell into the sea and went swimming, then she appeared to him after a day and threw him a shell with precious pearls in it, then she turned and went away, so that boy was known as the son of the marine. And in the islands of Waq Waq there is ebony that is unsurpassed in quality.
And he mentioned it in other places:
In an article published in Engmarde.
In Bartail's article.
In the article Clouds.
In the article Al-Sarif.
The Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires mentioned in his book Suma Oriental :
“It is a country with so much gold that its people make chains for their dogs and collars for their monkeys out of gold, and they bring shirts woven from gold. ” This is consistent with Ibn Khordadbeh and al-Razi’s description of Waq Waq.
Captain Buzurg bin Shahriyar al-Waq Waq mentioned in his book The Wonders of India, its Land, Sea and Islands in several places:
“Ibn Lakis told me that they witnessed something astonishing about the affair of the people of Qawaq, and that is that they came to them in the year three hundred and thirty-four with about a thousand boats, and they fought them a fierce battle and were unable to defeat them, because around Qanbala is a strong fortress and around the fortress is a creek in which there is sea water and Qanbala, in that creek is like a fortified castle, and that some of them came to them and asked them about their coming to them and not to the rest of the country, so they said: They only came to them because they have goods that are suitable for their country and China, such as ivory, ivory, tigers and ambergris, and because they want the Zanj because of their patience in service and their stamina, and that they came to them from a year’s journey, and they plundered islands between which and Qanbala is a six-day journey and they seized several villages and cities from the base Zanj, the news of which is not known except for what is not known, so if the statement of these people and their story is correct that they came from a year’s journey, then this indicates the correctness of what Ibn Lakis is not from the matter of the Cuckoo Islands, and they are opposite China, and God knows best.
“Some people told me that they saw someone who entered the cuckoos and traded, and he described the vastness of the country and the islands - and by vastness of the country I do not mean that the countries are large, but the people of the cuckoos are many - and among them there is a resemblance to the Turks, and they are the most skilled of God’s creation in crafts, then he graduates in all of them and they are people of cunning, trickery, deceit, malice and great strength in everything.”
“Abu Muhammad al-Hasan ibn Amr told me that one of the captains told him that he had prepared a ship for him to go to Zabij, and they landed at a village in the Cuckoo Islands because the wind had thrown them there. When the people of the village saw them, they fled into the desert with whatever money they could get away with. The people of the ship were also afraid to disembark because they did not know the country nor did they know what the reason for the people’s flight was. They stayed in their ship for two days, and no one answered them or spoke to them in any way or for any reason. They brought down a man from the people of the ship who knew the language of the Cuckoos, and he went off deceived and left the village for the desert. He found a man who had climbed a tree and hidden himself in it. He spoke to him and was kind to him, so he fed him a piece of date that he had with him, and asked him about the reason for the people of the village’s flight and his safety, and he promised him something that he would give him if he told him the truth. He said to him: When the people of the village saw the ship, they thought that they wanted to attack them, and they fled with their king into the deserts and forests....
“A sailor told me that he was passing between Sirra and China in Sanbuq. He said: When we had traveled fifty miles from Sirra, the khab fell on us, and we threw some of the cargo into the sea. We remained in the khab for days, then the wind came upon us, and the ship did not hold, and we were on the verge of destruction. We wanted to throw ourselves into the sea and cling to an island, so we threw the buckets, not believing that we would be saved. The waves calmed down, and not an hour had passed before a group of people appeared to us from the island. We waited for some of them to come out to us, but none of them came out to us. We signaled to them, but they did not speak to us, and we did not know the place. We were certain that if we went down to them they would harm us, or there would be people behind them who would attack us, and we would not be able to bear them. We remained in our place for four days, and none of us went down to the two islands, nor did any of them cross to us. On the fifth day, we decided to go down to them, because we needed water and to ask them about the place, and we did not know the way. Then thirty men with weapons got off the boat and the waterwheels, and when we went up to them they all fled and only one man remained. So he spoke to us and only one of us knew his language. He said to us: This is an island of the cuckoo islands. So we asked him about the two islands, and he related that it is one of the cuckoo islands, and that there is no town near it except a distance of three hundred leagues. It is an island in which there is no one but them, and their number is forty souls. We asked him about our way to the tribe, and he knew and guided us, and we filled the water and set out towards the tribe as he had said. So we stayed for fifteen days and arrived safely to the tribe.
Manuscripts about Waq Waq were mentioned in the book Al-Bulhan by its author Abdul Hassan Al-Isfahani.
Waq-Waq tree
The name "Waq-Waq" is also given to an unusual tree. The first mention of it (although not the name) is in a Chinese source, in the Tongdian by the Chinese writer Du Huan , written from 766 to 801. The story was told to Du Huan by his father, who had lived in Baghdad for 11 years as a prisoner of war after the Battle of Talas River with the Abbasids . He claimed to have heard the following story from Arab sailors:
The king of Arabia had sent men who got into a ship, took their clothes and food, and set sail. They sailed for eight years without reaching the far shore of the ocean. In the middle of the sea they saw a square rock; and on this rock was a tree with red branches and green leaves. Little children were growing up on the tree; they were about six or seven thumbs tall. When they saw the men, they did not speak, but laughed and moved about. Their hands, feet, and heads were fixed to the branches of the trees.
- Du Hwan,
In Al-Isfahani's Kitab al-Bulhan , the painting entitled "The Waq-Waq Tree" is somewhat unusual because it shows how females reproduce and immortalize themselves. Female figures grow from the tree as if ripening like fruit until they ripen and fall to the ground, uttering a cry resembling "Waq-Waq!"
Al-Biruni , who wrote his masterpiece Kitab al-Hind in 1000, based on Sanskrit sources, mentions a country where people are born from trees and are attached to the branches by their navels . The waq-waq tree may also have a Sanskrit source, and the Arabic tales of the waq-waq are themselves a faint memory of a time when the Indonesian archipelago was in the orbit of Hindu-Buddhist culture.
The story of the Waq-Waq tree traveled westward, like many other Eastern stories, and appears in at least one surviving manuscript of the 14th-century traveler Odoric in one of the many medieval French accounts of Alexander the Great. Its final appearance dates from 1685, when all the mysteries of the Indian Ocean had long since faded in the light of pragmatic European calculations. It is mentioned in The Ship of Solomon, an account of a Persian embassy to Siam ( now Thailand ) written by a scribe accompanying the expedition. He says he heard it from a Dutch captain :
Once, on our way to China, we dropped anchor in the bay of an island to avoid a violent storm. There was a strange group of people who inhabited the island who hardly looked like human beings. Their feet were three cubits long, they were completely naked, and they had very long hair. At night, everyone climbed to the top of their trees in the forest, even the women, who carried their children under their arms. Once they reached the tree, they tied their hair to the branch and hung there all night and rested.
Nothing demonstrates the blend of Indian Ocean cultures more than the story of the Waq-Waq tree: it probably originated in a Hindu Sanskrit text , was told by an Arab sailor to a Chinese envoy in the 8th century, brought to Europe by a Franciscan monk , and then retold by a Dutch sea captain to a Persian envoy to the King of Siam.
Waq Waq in literature
The Waq Waq Islands were mentioned in the book One Thousand and One Nights as a mythical, fairy-tale country.
The novel Alice in the Land of Waq-Waq! by its author Hayat Al-Yaqout is a fantasy novel, in which “Alice” takes place in the Land of Waq-Waq, not Wonderland .
The Tragedy of Waq al-Waq by Muhammad Mahmoud al-Zubayri , if classified as a novel, is considered a model of the traditional Yemeni novel that delves into social and religious matters.
Ash’ab in the land of Waq al-Waq, written by Wajih Yaqoub al-Sayyid
The search for the antidote in the land of Waq al-Waq, written by Sabawi Abdul Karim .
The novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan by Ibn Tufayl .
Source: Wikipedia