How Islamic world embraced, rejected, and then embraced chess again (2024)

Is chess “haram” and “unIslamic”? For brief while, fundamentalist Islamic “scholars” — from both Sunni and Shia camps — decreed it is and banned the game. Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh once ruled that chess is forbidden in Islam, saying it encourages gambling and is a waste of time. And Iraq’s supreme Shia religious authority Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani also issued rulings forbidding chess. Iran’s clerics banned playing of chess in public after the 1979 Islamic revolution, saying it was haram.

Mercifully, that phase has passed, and today the Islamic world has several top notch players, few more exciting than Iran-born Alireza Firouzja, currently the world’s third ranked player, although he took French nationality last year after a rift with Iranian chess federation which did not want him to play against Israelis. Today, FIDE’s top 100 has several players of Islamic faith, including Azeribaijani Shakhriyar Mamedyarov at # 12, Uzbek Nodirbek Abdusattorov at # 46 and UAE’s rising Saleh Salem at # 53.

In fact, one of the more uplifting things about the ongoing Chess Olympiad outside Chennai is that the entire Islamic world is participating, notwithstanding Israel’s presence, save of course for Pakistan, which withdrew just ahead of the opening citing the Olympiad torch relay passing through Kashmir.

Of course, one can always trust to converts (in any religion) to be more extremist in display of faith and piety than originals. Some years ago, when the cricketer Mohammed Kaif shared a photograph of himself playing chess with his young son on social media, he was attacked by the faithful from the sub-continent, one whom told him ”Kaif bhai ye khel haram hai,” while another advised him teach his son ”deen aur quran.” Kaif’s classy response: ”Thekeedar ji se poochiye, is breathing haraam or not.”

Indeed, Kashmir is central to the chess story — a smarter Pakistan could have laid claim to chess, but it would rather claim Kashmir. A small problem with that though is chess predates Islam. One version of its origin is that it was born in Kashmir as “chaturanga” — from which came the world shatranj. Most chess historians agree that it was then taken to Persia, where it became a part of the princely or courtly education of Persian nobility, and onward it went to Europe with Islamic conquests before returning to India, becoming wildly popular among the Muslim elites.

Indeed, for centuries, chess was central to the Muslim ethos in the sub-continent. This was best illustrated in Munshi Premchand’s classic 1924 story Shatranj ke Khiladi, brought to cinematic life by the great Satyajit Ray. Whether Premchand knew of the Mir Sultan Khan and his exploits (more soon about the greatest Indian chess player before Vishy Anand), which gained international recognition only in the 1929-1933 time frame, is not known.But noblemen of Awadh, where Premchand’s story is set, and other principalities, were evidently awash in the game even as the Company Bahadurs came marching in.

Among them was a Muslim overlord in Sargodha (in present day Pakistan) named Colonel Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana, who recognized the early chess promise in his equerry (stable boy) named Mir Sultan Khan. Vigorously promoting the young, unlettered boy, the Nawab unleashed him on the European circuit in the late 1920, creating a sensation. Barely literate and only then getting familiar with western systems and notations, the young Khan stunned top players of his generation, winning three British Open crowns, the chess equivalent those days of Wimbledon.

An underreported accompaniment to Mir Sultan Khan’s story: Sir Hayat Khan’s female servant Fatima also won the British Open title for women in 1933. Digest that, you orthodox idiots. It wasn’t just Muslim men, Muslim women played chess too. Imagine an Indian Muslim woman creating a sensation in London some 85 years before the Indian women’s cricket team made headlines.

Khan’s exploits were widely reported in the media at that time, including in The Times of India in 1935, when he arrived in Bombay for a simultaneous chess display in a club in Tamarind Lane in Fort. Subsequently, he began to fade out from public view disappearing altogether by the mid-1950s when Sargodha, his home town, went to Pakistan., where both his body and his fame and reputation lies buried. But in his heydays, he was a subject of immense curiosity and awe among his contemporaries.

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