Topic: Chess forbidden in Islam, rules Saudi mufti, but issue not black and white - page 2. (Read 1196 times)
January 22, 2016, 04:33:21 PM
The Saudis are patzers, their top player is ELO 2195 and number 25 on the list ELO 1008 (slightly better than your next chimpanzee). But the small Gulf kingdoms have quite good players and Iran and Egypt are decent chess powers. Turkey has lots of good players.
January 22, 2016, 04:25:50 PM
I guess the mufti realized that if people playing chess, they will inevitably start thinking. A wahhabi who is thinking...?!? That would be the end of the world as they know it 
.
.I think that it might also be simply because that's something close to distraction. And they don't want anyone to be distracted from God :/
But yeah result is the same. Chess is not important by itself. But I bet they ban everything developping your mind... That's what happens with religions...
"God does not play dice", said Einstein. Allah does not play chess, according to a saudi mufti...
Ahahahah xD
You, sir, actually made me lauch
January 22, 2016, 04:04:57 PM
I guess the mufti realized that if people playing chess, they will inevitably start thinking. A wahhabi who is thinking...?!? That would be the end of the world as they know it .
.I think that it might also be simply because that's something close to distraction. And they don't want anyone to be distracted from God :/
But yeah result is the same. Chess is not important by itself. But I bet they ban everything developping your mind... That's what happens with religions...
"God does not play dice", said Einstein. Allah does not play chess, according to a saudi mufti...
January 22, 2016, 03:38:15 PM
I guess the mufti realized that if people playing chess, they will inevitably start thinking. A wahhabi who is thinking...?!? That would be the end of the world as they know it .
.I think that it might also be simply because that's something close to distraction. And they don't want anyone to be distracted from God :/
But yeah result is the same. Chess is not important by itself. But I bet they ban everything developping your mind... That's what happens with religions...
January 22, 2016, 03:16:23 PM
I guess the mufti realized that if people playing chess, they will inevitably start thinking. A wahhabi who is thinking...?!? That would be the end of the world as they know it .
. January 22, 2016, 12:54:57 PM
Chess forbidden in Islam, rules Saudi mufti, but issue not black and white
Game likely to take on status of minor vices such as music after Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh says it encourages gambling
Kareem Shaheen in Beirut
Thursday 21 January 2016 12.31 GMT Last modified on Friday 22 January 2016 14.20 GMT
Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti has ruled that chess is forbidden in Islam, saying it encourages gambling and is a waste of time.
Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh was answering a question on a television show in which he issues fatwas in response to viewers’ queries on everyday religious matters.
He said chess was “included under gambling” and was “a waste of time and money and a cause for hatred and enmity between players”.
Chess is gloriously rebellious. Maybe that’s what Saudi Arabia’s mufti fears
Sheikh justified the ruling by referring to the verse in the Qur’an banning “intoxicants, gambling, idolatry and divination”. It is not clear when the fatwa was delivered.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s supreme Shia religious authority, has previously issued rulings forbidding chess.
After the 1979 Islamic revolution, playing chess was banned in public in Iran and declared haram, or forbidden, by senior clerics because it was associated with gambling. But in 1988, Iran’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, lifted the ban and said it was permissible as long as it was not a means of gambling. Iran now has an active confederation for playing chess and sends players to international games.
Moves to suppress chess are likely to have come as a surprise to the seventh-century Muslims who conquered Persia and adopted the game before exporting it to Europe.
Muslim scholars tend to place chess, a skill-based game, in a different category from games of chance, such as dice, but frown upon it if it distracts a person from performing the five daily prayers. Placing bets under any circumstances is forbidden.
Nigel Short, the British chess grandmaster, told the BBC that forbidding chess in Saudi Arabia would be a “great tragedy”. “I don’t consider chess to be a threat to society. It is not something that is so depraved as to corrupt morals,” he said. “Even Ayatollah Khomeini came to the conclusion that he’d gone too far and repealed his own ban.”
The region’s clerical establishment figures are no strangers to seemingly strange fatwas, or edicts. In the early 2000s, Saudi and other clerics issued a fatwa against the popular Pokémon franchise, and during football’s 2010 World Cup in South Africa, religious scholars in the United Arab Emirates said that using the widely reviled vuvuzela instrument was forbidden if the sound produced was above 100 decibels.
It is unlikely that Sheikh’s ruling will be enforced, and more plausible that chess will be relegated to the status of other minor vices, such as music, which many in the clerical establishment frown upon. Moreover, since the ruling was in response to a specific question, it was probably meant as an advisory opinion rather than a formal edict.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/21/chess-forbidden-in-islam-rules-saudi-arabia-grand-mufti#img-1
Game likely to take on status of minor vices such as music after Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh says it encourages gambling
Kareem Shaheen in Beirut
Thursday 21 January 2016 12.31 GMT Last modified on Friday 22 January 2016 14.20 GMT
Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti has ruled that chess is forbidden in Islam, saying it encourages gambling and is a waste of time.
Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh was answering a question on a television show in which he issues fatwas in response to viewers’ queries on everyday religious matters.
He said chess was “included under gambling” and was “a waste of time and money and a cause for hatred and enmity between players”.
Chess is gloriously rebellious. Maybe that’s what Saudi Arabia’s mufti fears
Sheikh justified the ruling by referring to the verse in the Qur’an banning “intoxicants, gambling, idolatry and divination”. It is not clear when the fatwa was delivered.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s supreme Shia religious authority, has previously issued rulings forbidding chess.
After the 1979 Islamic revolution, playing chess was banned in public in Iran and declared haram, or forbidden, by senior clerics because it was associated with gambling. But in 1988, Iran’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, lifted the ban and said it was permissible as long as it was not a means of gambling. Iran now has an active confederation for playing chess and sends players to international games.
Moves to suppress chess are likely to have come as a surprise to the seventh-century Muslims who conquered Persia and adopted the game before exporting it to Europe.
Muslim scholars tend to place chess, a skill-based game, in a different category from games of chance, such as dice, but frown upon it if it distracts a person from performing the five daily prayers. Placing bets under any circumstances is forbidden.
Nigel Short, the British chess grandmaster, told the BBC that forbidding chess in Saudi Arabia would be a “great tragedy”. “I don’t consider chess to be a threat to society. It is not something that is so depraved as to corrupt morals,” he said. “Even Ayatollah Khomeini came to the conclusion that he’d gone too far and repealed his own ban.”
The region’s clerical establishment figures are no strangers to seemingly strange fatwas, or edicts. In the early 2000s, Saudi and other clerics issued a fatwa against the popular Pokémon franchise, and during football’s 2010 World Cup in South Africa, religious scholars in the United Arab Emirates said that using the widely reviled vuvuzela instrument was forbidden if the sound produced was above 100 decibels.
It is unlikely that Sheikh’s ruling will be enforced, and more plausible that chess will be relegated to the status of other minor vices, such as music, which many in the clerical establishment frown upon. Moreover, since the ruling was in response to a specific question, it was probably meant as an advisory opinion rather than a formal edict.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/21/chess-forbidden-in-islam-rules-saudi-arabia-grand-mufti#img-1
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