The Support of the Needy on the Legal Ruling of Chess

exactly them, and they were eighty-six small individuals along with their elder, making two hundred and five. Their surrounding numbers totaled four hundred thousand and some. Abu Ishaq said on the authority of Masruq: "They entered Egypt and they were ninety-three, including both men and women." This concludes the quote. When the author of The Lectures of the Literati and the Conversations of the Eloquent Al-Raghib al-Isfahani, an 11th-century scholar known for his encyclopedic collections of literature and ethics. mentioned the doubling of the squares of the chessboard, he followed it by saying: "This is something I have extracted by way of analogy." Then I extracted it by another way, easier than the first, by assigning a specific category for each row of the eight rows on the board.

I assigned to the first square of the first row a dirham a silver coin and a unit of weight and doubled it until its end, reaching two hundred and fifty-six dirhams by doubling the final square of that row as well. Likewise, I assigned to the second row

a mann, to the third a witr, to the fourth a bayt literally "house" or "room", to the fifth a khan an inn or warehouse, to the sixth a sikka an alley or lane, to the seventh a mahalla a district or quarter, and to the eighth a balda a town or city. I performed on these what I did with the first row regarding the doubling until the end. Each of these assigned categories thus reached two hundred and fifty-six units. And so, the result of the Sage's Referring to the mythical inventor of chess, often identified as Sissa ibn Dahir. proposal is: two hundred and fifty-six towns; in every town, two hundred and fifty-six districts; in every district, two hundred and fifty-six lanes; in every lane, two hundred and fifty-six inns; in every inn, two hundred and fifty-six rooms; in every room, two hundred and fifty-six measures; in every measure, two hundred and fifty-six manns; and in every mann of straw, two hundred and fifty-six dirhams.

I have set for this calculation a table to make it easy for the reader to understand. I placed a dirham in the first square of the first row and doubled it until its end, passing through the straw, then the mann became a witr, the witr became a bayt, the bayt became a khan, the khan became a sikka, the sikka became a mahalla, the mahalla became a balda, and the balda became a 'alam a world or universe. It was as if the Sage had proposed to the King the filling of the entire earth with gold, which is an impossibility both rationally and by custom—unless his intention with that proposal was to demonstrate his wit before the King, rather than to make a literal request of him. The table is as follows: