SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Taliban has banned many things since seizing Afghanistan nearly four years ago. There's no music, no videos of living creatures on most Afghan TV stations - that sounds like radio. Mostly no women or girls in school after the sixth grade or even in public without a male guardian. And now, no chess? NPR's Diaa Hadid brings us this report.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Switching focus, Taliban has banned chess in Afghanistan.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: The ban on chess may have made the news in some places - that's First Post here in India - but...
AHMAD SAMI HASSANZADEH: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: Former chess coach Ahmad Sami Hassanzadeh found out the hard way while in a park playing chess with friends.
HASSANZADEH: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: He tells NPR producer Fariba Akbari that they were accosted by men from the Taliban vice squad. He says, "they grabbed our boards and our pieces. They beat up two people."
HASSANZADEH: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: Hassanzadeh says one of the squad men told him and his friends...
HASSANZADEH: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: ..."Playing chess is forbidden. Buying a chess set is forbidden. Watching it is forbidden." Hassanzadeh says, in short...
HASSANZADEH: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: ..."Our harmless, fun game was gone."
The ban on chess was made public in May, but a female chess player told NPR that they'd effectively been barred from playing in public for years, even denied the chance to use facilities designated for women at the local chess club. She requested NPR not use her name for fear of retribution by the regime.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: Now she only plays chess at home.
"I can't deny it," she says. "It's frustrating."
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: Chess in Afghanistan is not madly followed like cricket or the national game - buzkashi. That's like polo, except jockeys have whips and they have to grab a goat's carcass with their hands.
(CHEERING)
HADID: But chess has long been played in Afghanistan.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Except during the rule of the Taliban, as they saw it as a waste of time and forbade it.
HADID: That's a board game obsessive on the YouTube channel UPRISE THE BOX. He's talking about the first time the Taliban banned chess when they came to power in the mid-'90s. The ban only ended after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban following 9/11.
So what's wrong with chess? The Taliban sports minister, Atal Mashwani, told journalists that chess is a form of gambling, and that's forbidden in Islam. It's a claim chess players we spoke to found baffling, like Jarullah Badghisi.
JARULLAH BADGHISI: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: He says, "it's just a hobby. Nobody gambles."
Nigel Short of the International Chess Federation says they're moving carefully to try to repeal the ban. He hopes the Taliban will see that Afghanistan...
NIGEL SHORT: Is an outlier. We have so many federations from countries that are Muslim.
HADID: But the idea of chess as a sleazy game of chance goes back to the first days of Islam.
JOHN BUTT: There was a misperception at the time of the Holy Prophet that this was a type of gambling.
HADID: John Butt is an Islamic scholar. He says one revered early Muslim even said...
BUTT: That only a sinner plays chess.
HADID: Only a sinner plays chess. But there was pushback that began around a century after the Prophet Muhammad died, when one of Islam's greatest scholars - known as al-Shafi'i - weighed in to say that chess...
RAYMOND KEENE: Was practice for warfare, for military maneuvers, and should therefore be permitted under Islamic law.
HADID: Sir Raymond Keene is an international chess grandmaster and writer. He says during al-Shafi'i's time, elites of one of Islam's greatest empires - the Abbasids of Baghdad - were mad about chess.
KEENE: During the Baghdad period, the greatest chess players in the world were all Islamic.
HADID: Those players spread the game to Europe. But the Taliban aren't the only ones who've banned chess. Iran did, too, after the revolution in 1978. It was repealed a decade later, and now Iran's a regional chess powerhouse. But there's been other controversies over the years. Four female chess players did not return to Iran after playing the game abroad without wearing a headscarf, which is mandatory in Iran - like Dorsa Derakhshani. She now lives in the U.S., and she says the Taliban's chess ban didn't surprise her.
DORSA DERAKHSHANI: It was more like, ah, another, like, classic dictatorship 101 move.
HADID: She says the Taliban are unlikely to change their minds. And she says, of Afghan chess players...
DERAKHSHANI: I'm hoping that you might get the opportunity to leave and represent another country.
HADID: Hassanzadeh, the former chess coach, says he dreams of leaving.
HASSANZADEH: (Speaking Dari).
HADID: He says, "banning chess is like cutting a piece out of my heart."
Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Mumbai.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUSTAF LJUNGGREN & SKULI SVERRISSON'S "OLIVE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
