A former chess coach found out the hard way about the Taliban enforcing its ban on chess. Ahmad Sami Hassanzadeh, 44, was in a park, playing chess in the western city of Herat with friends when they were accosted by members of the Taliban vice squad. "They shouted at us, they grabbed our chess sets and pieces and they beat up two of my friends," he recalled. One of his friends tried to challenge the men, who work for the ministry for the prevention of vice and promotion of virtue, which upholds the Taliban's hardline interpretation of Islam, as fleshed out in its recent morality laws. He says one of them told him: "Playing chess is forbidden. Buying a chess set is forbidden. Even watching it — is forbidden."
"In short," Hassanzadeh said in a telephone interview, "this healthy and harmless entertainment was snatched away from us."
The Taliban's ban on playing chess in public was reported in May by local and international media, but it appeared that it had begun long before, implemented in stops and starts. Hassanzadeh told NPR that after the Taliban seized power in August 2021, the local chapter of the Afghan chess federation held a competition in his hometown of Herat. After that, he says, he was told the federation wouldn't be allowed to hold any more games. But chess players were still allowed to play the game informally — in the parks, "like you do around the world."
But weeks before the ban was officially announced, Hassanzadeh said customs officials intercepted chess books and games he was importing from neighboring Iran and Pakistan. And then, he said, the national chess federation was officially suspended — he'd led the Herat chapter up until 2017. One woman told NPR that the suspension on women playing chess outside their homes began even earlier — after the Taliban came to power four years ago. That's when she and her friends were barred from their local chess club, which had a designated room for women to play chess.
The woman asked to remain anonymous because she was being critical of the Taliban and feared retribution.
She told NPR that she'd been a professional chess player for years — her father taught her the game as a child. Before the Taliban came to power, she used to run classes for women and girls. "Not only did the local community, families and schools not forbid us," she recalled, "we were actually encouraged."
"All that has changed," she said. "We still practice at home and online," she told NPR, "but it's not like playing in the open. I can't deny it — women feel frustrated."
Chess in Afghanistan isn't madly followed like cricket or the national game — buzkashi — a polo-like sport, except the jockeys have whips and they have to dash across a field holding the carcass of a goat or a substitute to win.
But chess players said the game has long been played here — except when the Taliban first came to power in 1996 — and banned chess, for the first time, said John Butt, an Islamic scholar who lived in Afghanistan during that time.
That chess ban ended in 2001 after the U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban in the wake of the deadly, militant attacks of 9/11, Butt said.
The Taliban suspended chess — during its first iteration of rule, and now, because it's "a means of gambling," the sports minister Atal Mashwani told the French news service, AFP. "There are religious considerations regarding the sport of chess," he added, without elaborating what those considerations were. He added: "Until these considerations are addressed, the sport of chess is suspended in Afghanistan."
But the president of the now disbanded Afghanistan Chess Federation says he believes the suspension is permanent. "The Taliban, when they decide, are firm in their decision," said Ghulam Ali Malikzad, who spoke from Germany, where he sought asylum after the Taliban seized power. "There is no hope that it will be reopened."
Because of .... gambling?
The claim that chess is a form of gambling was baffling, according to every chess player NPR spoke to, including Herat resident Jarallah Badghisi. "There's no gambling or betting in the official games," he said, referring to the ones that used to take place under the auspices of the chess federation. And "even people who play in the parks — it's a hobby."
Nigel Short, director of chess development at the international chess federation, says they're moving carefully to try to repeal the chess ban. He told NPR that he hopes the Taliban will see that their suspension makes them "an outlier. We have so many federations from countries that are Muslim — dozens and dozens."
But the idea of chess as a sleazy game of chance isn't new, said Butt, the Islamic scholar. It goes back to the first days of Islam. "There was this perception at the time of the holy prophet that this was a type of gambling," Butt said, referring to the prophet Mohammad. He says one revered early Muslim even said, "only a sinner plays chess."
There was pushback that began around the eighth and ninth century. That's when one of Islam's greatest scholars, known as al-Shafi'i weighed in. According to Sir Raymond Keene, an international chess grandmaster and writer, al-Shafi'i said that "chess was practice for warfare, for military maneuvers, and should therefore be permitted under Islamic law and that was the view that generally prevailed" and added conditions of playing chess, which included not gambling on the game or letting it distract a player from prayers.
Keene says that during al-Shafi's time, elites of one Islam's greatest empires, the Abbasids of Baghdad, played lots of chess. "Certainly during the Baghdad period," he said, "the greatest chess players in the world were all Islamic players, people like al-Suli and al-Lajlaj. These guys were fantastically good," he said — and ultimately spread the game to Europe.
Not the first chess ban
The Taliban aren't the only ones who have banned chess. Following the Iranian revolution, the religious authorities who assumed power banned chess over gambling concerns. It was repealed nearly a decade later on condition that players wouldn't gamble on the outcome. Now the country is a regional center for chess.
But Iran — which neighbors Afghanistan — has been at the heart of other chess-related controversies. Over the past eight years, at least four women chess players and a referee participated in a tournament in another country and were observed not wearing headscarves (which is mandatory in Iran). Fearing punishment, they decided not to return home.
They include Dorsa Derakhshani, who now lives in the U.S.
She told NPR that the Taliban's chess suspension didn't surprise her. "Classic dictator 101 move," she quipped. "Chess helps you think critically," she said. "If there's a dictatorship, they don't want thinkers."
Her message to Afghan chess players, she said, is that she hopes "you might get the opportunity to leave and get to represent another country."
Hassanzadeh, the former chess coach, says he dreams of leaving if the suspension isn't rescinded. "We've grown up with chess, it's woven into our veins," he said. "Banning chess is like cutting out a piece of my heart."
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