Muslim scholars tend to place chess, a skill-based game, in a different category from games of chance, such as dice, but frown upon it if it distracts a person from performing the five daily prayers. Placing bets under any circumstances is forbidden.

Majority and strong opinion of scholars of quran and sunnah is that anything which is accompanied by Music is haraam. The scholar of the ummah, Ibn ‘Abbaas (may Allaah be pleased with him) said: this means singing. Mujaahid (may Allaah have mercy on him) said: this means playing the drum (tabl). For men it is Haraam.

Imam Ashrafuz Zaman Khan, the group’s president and also head of the New York chapter of the Islamic Circle of North America, said dancing is prohibited because Muhammad never danced, and therefore Muslims should never dance. Other scholars said dancing is forbidden only if it leads to indecent touching or movements.

BRAIN GAME The notion that playing chess makes you smarter goes something like this: Chess requires concentration and intelligence, and as mathematics and literacy require the same general skills, then practising chess must also improve one’s academic achievement.

He compares chess to life and writes that foresight, circumspection and caution can be learnt from the game. After describing the effects chess can have on one’s perception of life he describes a set of moral rules that a chess player should hold, including to not cheat and not disturb the opponent.

Millions of new fans have flocked to chess.com for games, lessons and puzzles, giving the site its biggest annual growth since it launched in 2007, he said. Since March, it has added 12.2 million new members, including 3.2 million who joined after the show’s debut in late October.

The show was released in October during the COVID-19 pandemic and was viewed by a record 62 million households in its first month alone. Sales of chess sets in the United States jumped 87% during that time, while chess book sales shot up more than 600%, according to the NPD Group, a marketing research company.

But outside the glare of the media spotlight chess players now make up one of the largest communities in the world: 605 million adults play chess regularly — a number comparable to regular users of Facebook.

Abandonment of chess Having vanquished virtually all serious opposition, Morphy reportedly declared that he would play no more matches without giving odds of pawn and move. After returning home in late 1859, Morphy retired from active chess competition.

With large parts of the population in lockdown, chess has become a popular pastime and coping mechanism. Further fueling the growth of chess were collaborations of big streamers with strong chess players, which made some of them very popular Twitch streamers themselves.

In a previous article, we showed that chess players exhibit, on average, superior cognitive ability compared to non-chess players. And the skills needed to play chess have also been shown to correlate with several measures of intelligence – such as fluid reasoning, memory, and processing speed.