The Immortal Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

instituted broadly against any directly representational art or sculpture.
Lots
included gambling of any kind. Since chess play at the time quite often involved wagers—indeed, one ancient story from India portrayed young players betting their own fingers in games, cutting them off on the spot after a loss, cauterizing the wounds, and continuing to play—many first- and second-generation Muslims considered the game altogether tainted and plainly illegal. Others regarded chess as having no purpose other than recreation, and thus falling into the category of official disapproval (though not strict prohibition).
    A G UIDE TO S HATRANJ (I SLAMIC C HESS), CIRCA A.D. 700

    Ancient depiction of shatranj
             
    Other differences from modern chess
    • The board was not yet checkered.
    • Stalemating the opposing King resulted in a win for the player delivering stalemate. (In modern chess, stalemate results in a draw.)
    • Capturing all of the opponent’s pieces except the King also counted as a win, provided that one’s own King could not be left alone on the very next move.
    • There was no castling option (wherein the King essentially changes places with one of his Rooks—to be explained in detail in Chapter 3).
             
    But chess did have a purpose, a deadly serious one, according to many proponents at that time. It not only broadly sharpened the mind, but also specifically trained war strategists for battle. “There is nothing wrong in it,” proclaimed Muhammad’s second successor, the pious and austere Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. “It has to do with war.”
    Eventually, a general consensus found the game acceptable in the Islamic world under certain conditions:
             
    no wagering
    no interference with religious duties
    no displays of anger or improper language
    no playing in public
    no representational pieces
             
    This last item came out of the Koran’s prohibition against images. It is said that Ali ibn Abu Talib, Muhammad’s cousin, son-in-law, and the fourth caliph (
caliph
means “deputy of the prophet”), passed by a game in progress one day and asked, disapprovingly, “What
images
are these upon which you are gazing so intently?” By Indian and Persian tradition, chess pieces had vividly represented the mechanics of war, depicting tiny soldiers, elephants, chariots, horses, and so on. Islamic law forced a complete reconception of chess’s aesthetics. Muslim craftsmen abstracted the explicit Persian figures into elegant, hand-carved, cylindrical or rectangular stones with subtle indentations, bumps, and curves to symbolize a throne or a tusk or a horse’s head.

    Ceramic chess set from twelfth-century Iran
    They created symbols, that is, of symbols. The severe abstraction made the game acceptable to most religious authorities.
             
    B Y THE BEGINNING of the ninth century, the game had also spread farther westward, to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. In 802 the new emperor Nicephorus employed chess terminology to convey a threat to Caliph Harun ar-Rashid at his Baghdad palace:
             
    The empress into whose place I have succeeded looked upon you as a Rook and herself as a mere Pawn; therefore she submitted to pay you a tribute more than the double of which she ought to have exacted
from
you. All this has been owing to female weakness and timidity. Now, however, I insist that you, immediately on reading this letter, repay to me all the sums of money you ever received from her. If you hesitate, the sword shall settle our accounts.
             
    In life, as in chess, a rash player can too easily become caught up in the excitement of a single bold move and thus be utterly blind to his opponent’s obvious and devastating response. The caliph, a chess player himself, did not repay or reverse the flow of the tribute. Instead, his army marched on and laid siege to Nicephorus’s army at Heracleia, forcing him to