Posted on 12/27/2013 6:41:45 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The left politicizes everything. Islam Islamizes everything.
Traditional chess kings have a cross on the top (a design that has been in use for centuries). But this year in the UAE, they’ve removed the cross and replaced it with an Islamic crescent. A veteran chess player tells me: “In my entire life playing chess I have never seen such a thing.”
There’s a basic undercurrent of intolerance to the obsessive need to remake everything in your own image and destroy what is not yours in a fit of xenophobia.
The same impulse that led the Taliban to blow up the statues in Afghanistan led the UAE, whose people have sent plenty of money to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, to try and Islamize the chess set.
Installing a crescent on top is a minor thing.
When Muslims first hijacked the Indian game of Chaturanga, which became the Persian game of Shatranj, they destroyed all the chess pieces because they considered the figures to be blasphemous.
Chess as we know it had to be recreated in Europe once the dark shadow of Islam fell over the chessboard. This is what proper Islamic chess pieces looked like.
Compare that to the Indian originals
As usual, Islam made things worse.
Islam erases culture and identity. It eliminates character and personality. It exchanges creativity for a totalitarian facelessness. The sterility of the Islamic chess set is also the sterility of any society that falls under the shadow of Islam.
Islam relentlessly Islamizes everything, robbing it of its identity, and replacing it with the crudity of its totalitarian Sharia restrictions.
The pawns could be the women in their black bee keeper outfits.
Missing the obvious - the “knights” have to be in the shape of CAMELS.
Is the queen now only allowed to move two squares behind the king?
Everything prior to about 730 a.d. was equal to or better than what the ancient Greeks did . . . two dimensional, statues, whatever. Great stuff, even more contrast than the chess pieces from ancient India and the Islamic pieces in your graphic.
Everything after that time was backward, amateurish and even the best looked like something which a kid might do with one of those spiral art sets. One of the teenagers in our group asked "What happened to Persia about that time?"
When I answered "They were forced to convert to Islam", you could have heard a pin drop not only among our group, but the entire crowd in the exhibit which was, up until that point, carrying on the normal quiet chatter of an art gallery crowd.
One of the reasons the Islamofacist crowd in Iran so hated the Shah is that he highlighted the advanced state of Persian civilization before Islam.
Hey, it can’t be any worse than what the French did. In a fit of anti-clericalism after the French Revolution they changed the bishop to a jester.
Since chess started in India, the original animal was the elephant (fil). Persia changed it to the horse (faras).
[ Islam erases culture and identity. It eliminates character and personality. It exchanges creativity for a totalitarian facelessness. The sterility of the Islamic chess set is also the sterility of any society that falls under the shadow of Islam. ]
Political Correctness erases culture and identity. It eliminates character and personality. It exchanges creativity for a totalitarian facelessness. The sterility of the Political Correctness chess set is also the sterility of any society that falls under the shadow of Political Correctness.
Hmm, Islam and political Correctness....
Kind of a silly issue.
The “original” chess pieces didn’t have crosses on them.
Christians added a cross, Muslims replaced it with a crescent. Big woop.
What is more interesting is that they are retaining the “European” shape of pieces (aside from the cross) and rules, rather then replacing them with “Muslim” or original Indian versions.
This goes along with thousands of examples of Muslims adopting Christian or western norms, mostly because they don’t have anything to really compete effectively.
Ane extremely obvious example is the use of elections (fair or not) to provide supposed legitimacy to leaders. This has absolutely no precedent whatsoever in Islam, so their use of it is involuntarily admitting the superiority of western civ.
in the muslim version of chess it seems that the pawns arewomen under burkas.
i guess that means it takes two pawns to capture another piece.
Interestingly one Chinese version kept the horse, consigned the king and his councillors to a square (forbidden city)and added a cannon. Another substitues animals for men.
The Japanese version allows you to capture the opponents pieces and then drop them back on the board for your own use.
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