Al-Waq Waq is one of the three mythical islands that ancient Arabs believed in its existence. It was part of an archipelago that was ruled by a queen called Damahra. It’s said that she was covered from head to toe in gold and wore only sandals. If any of her subjects was caught wearing one, their punishment was leg amputation.
She rode elephants and was surrounded by beautiful servants, flags and a band of musicians. An eye witness reported that he saw the queen wearing a gold tiara and lying on a bed of gold, surrounded by four thousand virgin female slaves. The islanders were fire worshipers and had a special tree that was native only to their island.
The fruits of this tree were in the shape of women covered in great shells and dangled from their hair. Once the women/fruit had matured, it fell on the ground and as air passed through the shell the cry: “Waqa Waq!” could be heard clearly across the island, which the inhabitants considered a bad omen.
The same tree also existed on a nearby island but with a difference: the fruit/women smelled good and lived for a day after falling off the tree.
In the medieval ages, Muslim geographers tried locating the island. Some thought it was Madagascar, as ancient Arabs passed through it on their way home from Africa.
A more modern theory stated that the name was first introduced by Ibn Battuta- the famous Arab explorer- who used the Cantonese name of Japan. The second mythical island is that of Al-Rukh which was located in the sea of China.
An ancient sailor was shipwrecked there with his companions and witnessed a great shining dome that was more than hundred cubits high.
They got closer to discover that it was an egg of Al-Rukh bird. Being famished, they started hitting it with rocks and sticks till it cracked open. The chick was as big as a mountain and they slaughtered it on the spot, transporting the meat to their vessel.
They cooked and ate it to witness a great miracle the very next day: their older companions grew younger with darker beards! But it wasn’t the meat that was the reason behind their transformation but rather the stick that they used for stirring it, which was cut from the Tree of Life that grew on that island.
Alas, their happiness was short lived. As they sailed off the island the sky grew darker so suddenly. The sun was covered by the flight of the chick’s mother, who carried boulders in her claws, throwing it at them and creating massive waves like that of a tsunami.
Luckily, the sailors survived the attack to tell their story. The last island is Saksar -- probably in the Indian Ocean -- that was mentioned by Ibn Is’haq the famous Arab historian. He claims to have met a sailor who’d been shipwrecked on it along with others and described its inhabitants as: “dog faced but human bodied”.
The lot were imprisoned with another skinny man who warned them to never eat the food offered by the islanders as it was for fattening them up to be devoured later. The sailor managed to escape to the other side of the island where legless men were sitting under fruit-bearing trees.
One of them jumped on his shoulders to gather fruits from the tree tops. When he tried getting away, the legless man scratched his face. The sailor only managed to escape when a thorn got into the man’s eye and made him lose his balance and fall.
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