Games of Medieval Islam

[mgc1961]

The play instinct must have been as strongly developed in the Islamic world as elsewhere, but the moral and theological attitudes of Islam (following, in many ways, those of some classical Greek authors, such as Aristotle) tended to deprecate games and play as worthy only of women and children, that is those of weak moral fiber. From earliest Islamic times, games, sport, and the playing of musical instruments were regarded as distractions from the serious business of life and the accumulation of merit for the next world; caliphs such as the Umayyad Yazid I (680-683) were condemned for their frivolous mode of life and love of diversion, whereas other caliphs such as al-Mansur (754-775) displayed their true piety by destroying musical instruments and games equipment. Nevertheless, it is known that children had their games. The Koran refers to the prophet Yusuf as playing with his brothers; Muhammad is said to have played as a child; and his favorite wife, Aisha, had her dolls, although the licitness of dolls for girl children, as a preparation for motherhood, was only reluctantly conceded by Islamic law and ethics, which prohibited representation of living forms.

Specific children's games tend to mentioned by philologists for their literary interest alone; hence many names of games have come down to us, but rarely their modus operandi. They apparently included the following: games of mankala type, in which counters or pebbles are place in holes; games of the checkers type, of which the still-popular North African kharbga is a representative; games centered on rolling nuts or stones into holes; and those involving a throw of dice or bones. Swings and seesaws seem also to have been in use; Aisha was seesawing when first seen by the Prophet.

Sporting games included those played with balls, requiring running or jumping, and involving the use of animals, birds, and insects (for racing or fighting, for instance). Rewards and penalties were often involved, bringing an element of gambling into the games. Gambling attracted further disapproval from the purists, since the Koran specifically denounces the pre-Islamic Arabian gambling practice of maysir, which involved the drawing of lots by arrows and the slaughtering of a camel. This prohibition was later extended to all gambling (qimar), though the practice flourished at all times in the forms of betting, guessing, and casting of lots.

The general attitude of disapproval toward play meant that all games equipment must have been simple and improvised. Thus, virtually no Islamic toys or games equipment of significant antiquity has survived.

There were also essentially adult games involving intellectual thought and sharpness of wit. The most popular games in the Islamic world were chess (shatranj) and back gammon or trictrac (nard, tabula) which came from the East. Popular Islamic traditon correctly traced chess to an Indian origin, while backgammon was associated in legend with the Sasanian Persian king Ardesir. Proficiency at these games was regarded as a basic accomplishment of the educated elite; there were chess masters, and blindfold and simultaneous matches were known. Both games could be, and often were, played extensively for stakes; but the official attitude - as expressed, for instance, in some of the Arabic and Persian "Mirrors for Princes" literature - was not entirely disapproving. Since they sharpened the mind, it was conceded that they helped develop the strategic sense of military commanders and prices, and were thus a preparation for actual warfare. There was an extensive discussion of those two games, above all of chess, in medieval Islamic literature.

Field sports for adults were likewise encouraged because of the opportunities they gave for physical exercise and development, and above all for the military training of the mounted archer or lancer who, with the influx of Turkish soldiery into the caliphate from the ninth century become the backbone of most medieval Islamic armies. Horse racing was closely linked with gambling, but flight and target shooting with arrows was a basic part of military proficiency as well as a sport. The manuals of war and military training (furusiya), several of which survive from Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods, stress the importance of activities involving equestrian skill, such as tilting with lances at gourds mounted on poles; in Mamluk Egypt there were special hippodromes and training grounds for such sports. Above all, the games of polo (Persian: chawgan, Arabic: sawlajan), which originated in pre-Islamic Persia and the equipment and procedures of which are well known through their frequent depiction in miniature paintings, was the training par excellence for the cavalryman; a rougher parallel to it survives in the modern Afghan game of buzkashi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. W. Lane, Manners and customs of the Modern Egyptians (1954), 355ff.: Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam, Khuda Bukhsh, trans. (1937) 402-408: H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (1913), and A History of Board Games Other Than Chess (1952); Franz Rosenthal, Gambling In Islam (1975), and "la ib," in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (1960).

C. E. Bosworth

Dictionary of the Middle Ages vol. V, pgs 353-354.

You know, I heard the President knows how to play both chess and basketball. And, his daughters have dolls and a swing... :think: OMG, the Tea Party is right! It's all becoming clear now. The first family is a radically condescending hoard of un-American Islamofascist who've compromised our precious Judeo-Christian heritage!

:silly: