The news that the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has issued a fatwa against the game of chess should come as no surprise. There has always been a chequered history of relations between Islamic clerics and practitioners of the world’s most popular board game.
Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh is the most powerful Sunni religious figure in Saudi Arabia and issued the fatwa while answering viewers’ questions during his weekly television broadcast ‘With his Eminence the Mufti’. The show was first broadcast in 2014, but the Grand Mufti’s censorious condemnation of chess, during which he compared it to the pre-Islamic Arab game of Maisir, has only this week achieved prominence. According to the Mufti, chess is ‘haram’. He suggests it is a waste of time and causes people to squander money, presumably through gambling. This presumption is reinforced when one realises that Maisir – a game forbidden by the Koran – involves players shooting arrows to win pieces of camel meat, and offers considerable opportunities for gambling on the outcome.
The reaction of the Saudi Chess Association has, predictably, been sceptical. Their legal representative, Musa Bin Thaily, claimed that the fatwa lacks legal force. Public music festivals are also subject to fatwa, but they are common and the fatwa is not enforced by law. In the Islamic world chess has, from time to time, been serially banned and then reinstated. When the Ayatollahs came to power in Iran, one of their first acts was to ban chess; during the 90s, the Taleban prohibited chess in Afghanistan. The Iranian proscription has now been lifted and Britain’s former world championship contender, Nigel Short, has become a regular guest in Tehran.
The periodically hostile attitude of Islam towards chess is curious, given that chess first flourished in the Baghdad caliphate over a millennium ago and Harun Al-Rashid, the Abbasid Caliph of Islam from 786-809 CE, was known to be a lover of chess. The problem derives from interpretation of a verse of the Koran which reads: ‘O true believers, surely wine and lots and images and divining-arrows are an abomination of the works of Satan, therefore avoid ye them that ye may prosper.’
Although chess is not specifically proscribed in the Koran, in 800CE, Muslim lawyers extended the condemnation of lots, dice and images to chess. A counter argument was advanced by Ash-Shafii, a ninth century jurist, who explained that chess was an image of war and that the game could be played as mental training, in preparation for military tactics and strategy, rather than just for a stake, wager or recreation. The view that chess is a mental exercise has tended to prevail, not least because the caliphs themselves were often avid chess players, and supported a court retinue of ‘Aliyat’ – the Islamic equivalent of Grandmasters – such as the celebrated As Suli. Indeed, Islamic tradition even states that the oldest chess problem on record was composed in 840CE by the Caliph Mutasim Billah, third son and successor of Harun Al-Rashid himself.
Chess famously depends on skill not luck. As more and more nations adopt chess as part of the school curriculum to enhance skills in mathematics, the mental virtues of chess are increasingly being recognised. As eight times world memory champion Dominic O’Brien commented, if chess is haram, so must be the use of imagination, logical thinking, strategic planning and memory. Perhaps the Grand Mufti accidentally confused chess with backgammon, a board game popular in Middle Eastern culture, which does indeed encourage gambling on the outcome. In fact, wagering and doubling form an integral part of backgammon strategy and tactics. If that is the case, then perhaps the worldwide community of chess players can safely take up their pieces once again, without offending religious sensibilities.
Raymond Keene is the Spectator’s chess columnist.
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