The Immortal Game by David Shenk Read Free Book Online Page B

more than his share of games, and even sometimes played blindfolded or against several people at once.
    After leaving Oxford to teach at preparatory schools, Murray broadened his commitment to the game as a school club coach. But the best way to make his personal mark on chess, he realized, was through a massive excavation of its history. No book had rigorously sought to establish the true origins of the game, trace the early history, and then bring it up to the present. The challenge of writing the definitive history of chess, spanning 1,300 years and dozens of languages, was monumental. Even with all the resources at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, tracking a thousand-year-old chess migration across continents and religions and cultures was like trying to find and track a bird without any homing device. But for the trained son of James Murray, it was suitably proportional, a fitting family task. Harold Murray set out in 1897 “to investigate…the invention of chess; and to trace the development of the modern European game from the first appearance of its ancestor.” This impossible job would consume much of his energy for the next sixteen years, and become his life’s one great work.
    One of Murray’s first chores was to learn Arabic and immerse himself in the early days of Islam. He documented how the Muslims took to chess, wrestled with its legality and propriety, and plugged it into their intellectual and territorial ambitions. Then he traced the Islamic geographic expansion, and chess’s.
    Following Muhammad’s death in 632, the empire grew at a staggering pace, expanding into Persia, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Nubia, Libya, Morocco, Cyprus, Sicily, and parts of Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, and China. By 900, Muslim armies controlled an uninterrupted stretch of land and sea from the Himalayas all the way across North Africa and into Spain.
    So also went Islamic culture. In 1005 the Egyptian ruler al-Hakim tried to outlaw chess and ordered the burning of all chess sets in his territory. But it was too late to stop the game’s march across North Africa. Murray discovered references to Muslim players in Cairo, Tripoli, Sicily, Sijilmasa, Fez, Seville, and Córdoba.
    The game may have enjoyed its European debut in 822, having been introduced to the emir of Córdoba, Abd-al-Rahman II, by an outcast Persian Muslim nicknamed Ziriab. A onetime slave, Ziriab had trained in Baghdad with the legendary musician Ishaq at the court of Harun ar-Rashid. Then he became too good at his job: after Ziriab had the audacity to outshine his mentor in the presence of their caliph, Ishaq stepped in to protect his ground. “Jealousy is the oldest human evil,” Ishaq warned Ziriab. “No one is immune to it, not even I. There is not room enough at this court for both of us. You can choose between two things. Either you stay here and I’ll have you killed, or you go so far away from here that I’ll never hear of you again. If you choose this, I’ll give you the [travel] money.” Thus began an epic journey, wives and children in tow, across North Africa, into Morocco, and finally across the Strait of Gibraltar into Muslim Spain. When he arrived in Córdoba, this unwitting ambassador from Baghdad brought an early glimpse of the Islamic enlightenment. Famous for the sounds of his gut-stringed lute, Ziriab also dazzled Emir Abd-al-Rahman II and friends with refinements in cooking, fashion, hygiene, home decor, and recreation. Baghdad’s favorite new board game of symbolic warfare was apparently an instant hit in Spain. The very next emir, Mohammed I, was personally devoted to the game.

    Meanwhile, chess also made its way into Italy via Sicily. Bands of Muslims from modern-day Spain, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt attacked and eventually conquered Sicily in the ninth century. The new Sicilians modeled their city of Bahl’harm (modern-day Palermo) on glorious Baghdad. These same groups also tentatively occupied areas on the