The Islamic world has always had a chequered relationship with chess

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.