![]() ![]() The Queen is the powerhouse of the chessboard, commanding the most flexibility. The King also participates in the special move ‘castling’, allowing for strategic defensive play. In chess, the King is the heart of the game.ĭespite moving only one square in any direction, its survival is paramount – a checkmate against it signals the end of the game. So, fasten your seatbelts it’s time to dive deep into the world of chess pieces! Names of Chess PiecesĪlright, let’s kick things off with the roll call of our star players on the chessboard. We’ll also uncover the rich history behind these pieces and discover the fascinating evolution they’ve undergone. In this article, we’ll take a tour through the 32 warriors of your chess army, understand their roles, and learn how best to deploy them on your battlefield. Muslim use: star and crescent rather than cross on his head.Greetings, future grandmasters! As a beginner, understanding your chess pieces – their names, their moves, and their values – is your first step towards mastering this age-old game.Įach piece, from the humble pawn to the mighty queen, has its own set of rules and strategic importance. The Saudi/Wahhabist monarchy still contends with a contemporary version of the Cafe de la Regence. The Cafe de la Regence was a place where Ben Franklin might be found playing, along with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Chess once stood for Enlightenment reason as opposed to clerical and feudal rule. ![]() Islam still argues with itself about chess. It should be said that these abstract Islamic chess pieces are beautiful, in an unexpectedly modern way. Make of it what you will, the queen is a European innovation. There is no queen in Chinese chess either. As for the queen, well, she was no problem for Muslim chess, since there was no queen. (Yes, the elephant was once an active piece: Chinese chess, xiangqi, is known, for short, as elephant chess). Thus, on their chess sets, the horse, which we call the knight, was not allowed to bear any resemblance to an actual horse it had to be represented abstractly, by means of an assortment of holes poked into the exterior. Islam took the second commandment’s ban on graven images very seriously. They authored the first serious studies of chess, but their tension about it extended to representation of the pieces. Muslims both brought the game to Europe - along with the works of Plato and some basics of arithmetic - and shied away from it. Islam has had a fruitful but conflicted relationship to chess. ![]() I prefer to align myself with Muslim advocates of chess who have tweeted, contra said Mufti, that “chess is an intelligent game and that is why conservative clerics decry it.”Īnd there’s no doubt that the Mufti was talking about some other pursuit when he said chess makes “rich people poor and poor people rich.” Perhaps he was thinking of backgammon. And Fischer hadn’t even lost when he lost his cookies: the very thought of losing - losing, ever, again, even once- was enough to bring out all that was broken and bonkers in him, which was plenty.īut I’m not yet ready to convert to the Wahhabi version of Islam (or, for some strange reason, any other version) despite the insights of the fatwa-hurling Mufti. The Mufti argues, further, that chess “leads to rivalry and enmity.” Losing in chess does indeed provoke anxiety and dire imaginings, suicidal and homicidal. It is also said that the Devil invented the violin. Chess, according to the Mufti, and others, and not without evidence, springs from the latter. (There is Intelligent Design, and then there is Malign Design. For example, he calls it “the work of Satan,” and who of sound mind, from novice to master, could object, as in who but Lucifer himself could have cooked this game up?Ĭhess queen found on the Isle of Lewis in the early 1800s, as part of a set carved out of walrus tusk and whale bone, circa 12th century. To be sure, some of his indictments of the game have merit. Saudi Arabia’s leading religious authority, Grand Mufti Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, last week put a fatwa on chess in advance of a tournament scheduled to be held in the holy city of Mecca. ![]()
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