Page 11 - Arabian Studies (II)

THE GAME OF MAYSIR AND SOME

MODERN PARALLELS
by A. F. L. BEESTON

‘They will ask you about wine and may sir. Say, in both is great sin as
well as benefits, but the sin is greater than the benefit’ (Qur. ii. 219).
‘Wine, may sir, betyl stones and divinatory arrows are an abomination
of the work of the devil. . . . The devil wishes to disseminate enmity
and hatred among you in wine and maysir* (ibid., v. 90—1).
The commentators explain maysir as a verbal noun synonymous
with qimar ‘gambling’. We are told moreover that some legists
considered the disapproval of maysir to cover all games involving an
element of chance, including backgammon and even chess (by which
is perhaps meant that oriental variety of the game where the player’s
choice of which piece to move was limited by a throw of dice). There
seems to be evidence that this general application of the term to all
games of chance was known in pre-Islamic times. For when Shanfara
says, tafidu jinayatin tayasarna lahmahu, ‘aqiratuhu li-ayyiha humma
awwalu ‘hunted down by ills which have gambled for his flesh, to be
victim of whichever of them chances to befall first’, he must be
envisaging a winner-take-all type of gambling, and not the dividing-up
process to be described below, which is a highly specialized form of
gambling. The same conclusion must be drawn from two phrases
quoted in Zamakhsharl’s Asas al-balaghah, and cited in Anton
Huber’s Vber das Meisir genannte Spiel (Inaug.-Diss., Leipzig 1883,
p. 20), namely tayasarati, l-ahwa’u qalbahu ‘passions [for various
maidens] have gambled for his heart’ and az ‘anin tayasarna qalbahu
‘maidens who have gambled for his heart’.
But there are also allusions in early poetry to a very specialized
form of gambling, and the later Muslim philologists devote much
attention to it, to the extent of leaving the reader with the
impression that they view all references to maysir as implying the
specialized game. Zamakhshan’5 Kashshdf, for instance, although
beginning with the explanation of the word as formally a verbal noun
meaning ‘gambling’, immediately proceeds to describe one of the

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