The Cardamom Game - by Will Manidis - Minutes
The Cardamom Game
Apr 27, 2026
The Cardamom Game
لا، يا سيدي. هذا المكان مسكون.
No sir, this place is inhabited.
All we know about the tribesman is what Philby recorded in his field journal: he was tall, lean, wiry, and dark-skinned, identified only by his initial, S. He had stopped his camel at the crossing of a shallow wadi in the Rub’ al-Khali and refused to move further.
The depression below them was totally unremarkable. In their crossing they had found dozens like it: low limestone banks, the scattering of flint tools, the faintest trace of a carved channel that might have once carried water many years ago. Jack Philby had spent most of his life in the east at this point. A consummate British explorer and infrequent intelligence officer, he was mapping the Empty Quarter for Ibn Saud in January of 1927. He was the father of a much more famous traitor, though he did not know this yet. Philby asked what inhabited this place.
الجن
“What kind of jinn?”
الذين لعبوا
“Those who played.”
Philby mapped this place in his field journal with the name that S. had given it: Wādī al-Hīl (وادي الهيل). The Valley of the Trick. He pressed on and stumbled down into the depression alone. After this many years in the Empty Quarter, he had no patience for Bedouin superstition.
Philby would spend two hours surveying the site, and found, partially buried under sand on the eastern bank of the wadi, a stone tablet, approximately eighteen inches square, that bore a grid of incised lines, marking eleven rows by eleven columns, 121 squares in total, and in each a small cup-shaped depression stained a deep amber brown that he assumed was iron oxide.
The identification came much later. A chemical analysis performed at the British Museum on a fragment Philby had chipped from the edge and carried in a saddlebag for the remainder of the crossing identified the residue as Elettaria cardamomum, green cardamom, ground into such a fine powder and pressed into the limestone with such force and over such duration that it had seemingly chemically bonded with the stone.
الذين لعبوا.
Those who played.
The fragment of the game board sat in a drawer in Gallery 43 of the museum for forty years, catalogued as “gaming board, Arabian Peninsula, provenance unknown, possibly Nabataean.” No one looked at it again until 1971, when a doctoral student named Farah al-Rashid, who had dedicated herself to Abbasid-era trade networks during her graduate study at the University of London, found it misidentified among Palmyrene funerary objects, held it to the light, and smelled it. You could still smell the cardamom.
What al-Rashid would find in that drawer, and what she would spend the next eleven years reconstructing from scattered references in Kitāb al-Aghānī, the Murūj al-Dhahab of al-Mas’udi, and previously untranslated marginalia in a Buyid-era copy of the Shāhnāmeh held in the St. James’s home of a relatively unknown British Orientalist, was something that no one in the full history of Islamic scholarship had previously described.
From what she could piece together, the game was called al-Luʿbat al-Hāl (اللعبة الحال), The Game of the Condition, though its name appears differently across the sources. Al-Mas’udi, writing in Baghdad around 947 CE, refers to it obliquely in a passage about the amusements of the Buyid court as Hisāb al-Qāqulla (حساب القاقلة), or the Cardamom Accounting. A marginal note in the Shāhnāmeh copy, in a hand that al-Rashid dated to the late tenth century, uses the old Persian Bāzī-ye Hēl, the Cardamom Game. An anonymous treatise on the diseases of the soul held at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul and tentatively attributed to a student of al-Ghazali refers to it simply as al-Lawḥ (اللوح), The Board.
The game was played on a grid, and that grid was always eleven by eleven. It is an odd number, the significance of which al-Rashid could not explain. It does not correspond to any known numerological tradition in either the Islamic or pre-Islamic corpus. It is almost as if the number had been avoided. Each position on the grid held a small mound of ground cardamom. Hēl, in Persian. Hāl, in Arabic, a word that also means “condition” or “state,” a polysemy that the game’s inventors clearly understood.
وأهل العلم في الريّ، إذ لم يكن لهم حرب يحضرونها ولا مجاعة يدبّرونها، وجّهوا انتباههم إلى اللوح، فوجدوا في أحواله عمقاً يفوق عمق البحر بين البصرة وسيراف.
And the learned men of Rayy, having no war to attend and no famine to administer, turned their attention to the Board, and they found in its Conditions a depth that surpassed the depth of the sea between Basra and Siraf.
— attributed to al-Mas’udi, Murūj al-Dhahab, Vol. IV (al-Rashid translation)
The rules, at least as far as al-Rashid could reconstruct them, were these: two players sat opposite each other and each controlled a set of positions on the board marked by the color of the cardamom. The player to the south of the board played green cardamom, and the player to the north of the board played black. The black cardamom was the inferior Amomum subulatum , imported at great expense from the foothills of the Himalayas, some thousand miles away, specifically for this purpose.
On each turn, a player would move cardamom from one of his positions to an adjacent position, but the quantity moved was not determined by the player’s choice. It was determined by the condition, al-hāl , of the surrounding positions.
The cardamom was a ledger.
A move in one corner of the grid could cascade the counts through the game field in ways that al-Mas’udi, writing in the early years of the game, described as “beautiful and terrible and impossible to foresee.”
جميل ومريع ومستحيل التنبّؤ به.
The clerics of Rayy were the first to dedicate themselves to the game.
Rayy, modern Rey, is now a suburb of Tehran. But then it was the largest city on the Iranian plateau after Baghdad, and in the mid-tenth century it was at peace, an unusual and extended one. The Buyid dynasty, Shi’a Persian kings ruling under the nominal authority of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, had consolidated control of the Iranian plateau.
Today, the city is a few eroded mud-brick walls and a truncated minaret cut halfway through, rising through the pollution haze south of Tehran, with tour buses idling in gravel lots. But the city at its height held perhaps 200,000 souls on the alluvial plain beneath the Alborz mountains, the snow line visible in the mountains every winter from every rooftop, the air thin and dry and carrying the smell of charcoal and bread and, increasingly, cardamom. The Friday mosque held 10,000 worshipers. The bazaar ran for nearly a mile beneath vaulted brick ceilings that filtered the light into pale bands across the stalls. There was running water, and public baths tiled in geometric patterns so intricate that visitors a century later assumed they were painted rather than laid by hand.
The qāḍīs, the judges and clerics who ran the courts and kept the registers, lived in houses arranged around central courtyards. The courtyard was open to the sky while enclosed by walls, and contained a garden. Usually it was a chahār bāgh , the quartered garden, divided by water channels into four beds representing the four rivers of paradise in the Quran. At its center almost always was a pool, which was shallow and still and served no practical purpose other than to reflect the sky. You sat in the shade of the īwān, the vaulted reception hall that opened onto the courtyard, and looked across the garden at the sky reflected in the water.
This is where they played.
The boards were brought out after afternoon prayer, after the courts had been adjourned for the afternoon, after the petitioners had been dismissed, after the clerks had rolled up their registers, and after the tea had been brewed and poured. The tea would be served first, in small glasses on brass trays with a dish of saffron rock candy that you held between your teeth and let dissolve as you drank. The boards were limestone, always limestone, quarried from the hills near Hamadan and transported by mule to Rayy, and they were heavy enough that two men were needed to carry each one.
They were placed on low wooden tables between cushions, and the cardamom was set out in open cups, green ones in white cups and black in copper ones, and the game would begin.
Al-Tha’ālibi writes that the qāḍīs of Rayy had developed what he called suqm al-farāgh(سقم الفراغ), the sickness of emptiness.
The qāḍīs would attend their courts and adjudicate their disputes, but the disputes were increasingly small. It was a peaceful time. The courts were orderly, and the afternoon stretched before them like the long road from Rayy to Hamadan: straight, flat, hot, and featureless.
Into this emptiness the Cardamom Game arrived.
Al-Rashid could not determine who invented it. The sources disagree. Al-Mas’udi attributes it to “a Persian of Jundishapur,” the old Sassanid academy town, which would place its origins in the tradition of Indo-Persian exchange that also produced chess.
The Ghazalian student in Istanbul attributes it to a Sufi of Balkh, which gives the game origins that are closer to the Afghan mystics. A Geniza fragment from Cairo, discovered by al-Rashid in 1978 and published in an obscure issue of the Revue des études islamiques , attributes it to “a Jew of Isfahan who taught it to the fire-worshippers and they to the Muslims,” which, if true, and few believe it is, would make its lineage Zoroastrian.
By the late tenth century the game had consumed enough of Rayy’s clerical class to alarm even the Buyid emir, ʿAḍud al-Dawla , who was not easily alarmed. ʿAḍud al-Dawla, by all accounts, was himself a player.
At midday in the summer the light on the Iranian plateau is absolutely scalding. It erases shadows and turns the garden into a bright field of undifferentiated white. By the time the qāḍīs had begun their game, two or three hours after noon, the light had shifted. The western wall of the courtyard would cast a shadow across the pool, and the eastern wall caught the descending sun and turned the color of apricot. The garden, which at noon had been flattened by light, recovered its depth.
The roses in the chahār bāgh, the Damask rose that the Persians had cultivated for a thousand years before Islam, reopened in the cooling air, and the smell of them mixed with the cardamom on the boards, and the sound of the water in the channels. The courtyards were silent, except for the sound of the cardamom being moved, a dry, quiet sound, like sand poured from one hand to another.
Two men sitting across a limestone board, moving small mounds of green and black powder from depression to depression. Seated in a garden beneath the sky that was slowly turning from white to gold, while the city outside the walls tried to conduct its business while the court sat empty and the registers lay unread. The men would never speak during the game. The game did not require it.
And they sat and moved the cardamom and played the ledger out.
Al-Tha’ālibi, who visited Rayy in 1004 CE, describes entering the courtyard of a qāḍī named Abū Manṣūr al-Ṭūsī, attested in multiple sources as a judge of the Shāfiʿī court of Rayy, and finding him mid-game with a visiting scholar from Bukhara.
Al-Tha’ālibi writes that he stood in the entrance of the īwān for “the duration it takes to recite Sūrat al-Wāqiʿa, seven minutes or so, before either player acknowledged his presence. When Abū Manṣūr finally looked up, al-Tha’ālibi writes, his expression was that of “a man who has been called back from a place very far away, and who is not pleased to have been called.”
Al-Tha’ālibi left a detailed description of Abū Manṣūr al-Ṭūsī. He was old, over sixty by this point, which in the tenth century was very, very old, and he had a white beard covering his dark skin and angular features. He was partially deaf in one ear, the left, from a childhood illness, and he was a Shāfiʿī jurist of the highest rank, trained in the schools of Baghdad for many years, posted to Rayy in his thirties, and elevated to the senior bench in his forties. Across his life, he had adjudicated thousands of disputes across property, marriage, inheritance, contract, and the rest of what Islamic law touches which is to say, everything. He had spent his career making decisions that altered lives, and now, in his sixties, in a time of remarkable peace across these lands, the lives he was asked to alter had become small. A boundary dispute between two merchants, a contested dowry, the ownership of a dead man’s donkey.
But there was the board, the eleven by eleven grid, the 121 conditions, and the nearly infinite cascades that came out of it.
A move in any corner, the player lifting a pinch of black cardamom from position 7-9 and distributing it one grain at a time clockwise through the adjacent positions. This redistribution would change conditions across the board from position 83, which had been balanced for nearly one hundred moves, whose subsequent imbalance would propagate westward through a chain of positions that the players had not touched in hours and could not have anticipated. And the green player’s formation in the center of the board, a formation that he had spent the last twenty minutes constructing with the care of a mason laying stone in the courtyards, collapsed silently, ending his defense. The game was played through the accumulated weight of conditions that no individual sitting at the board could choose and no individual could have predicted.
Al-Ghazali would call it the worshipful contemplation of patterns that form something like the divine order but are empty of the substance of the beyond.
التأمُّل التعبُّدي في الأنماط التي تُشكِّل ما يُشبِه النظامَ الإلهيَّ، لكنّها خاوية من جوهر الماوراء.
The cascades that would play out over the board certainly felt like providence. Each move felt like a movement of the divine will through creation, mirroring the ways that in our lives a single decision by a single person in a single moment can propagate through the fabric of our lives and produce consequences that were never intended and far beyond our foresight.
The board was the world as the qāḍīs knew it from their courts. You intervened, and the consequences exceeded your intention. You reasoned carefully, and the reasoning was not enough.
But the board was far from the world. The board was eleven by eleven and the world was nearly infinite, at least as the Islamic tradition tells us. The board would resolve in an afternoon of play. The world did not. We never get to finish this game. And the board answered with an end state, while our world is decidedly silent.
The green Elettaria grows in the Western Ghats of southern India, primarily in what is now Kerala, the hills above the Malabar coast, where the monsoons batter the mountains with walls of rain, and the forest floor is soaked, wet, and shaded, and the temperature never drops below ten degrees centigrade, and the cardamom plants grow in the understory beneath the tall trees, and their pods cluster low on stems near the ground, pale green when harvested and dark when dried. The black Amomum grows even further in the eastern Himalayas, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, at altitude and in conditions that are cold and damp and unlike anything any Persian had ever seen.
Both arrived in the Persian Gulf through the Indian Ocean trade, a network of dhow routes that connected Basra and Siraf and Hormuz to the Malabar coast. The journey took several weeks, even with favorable monsoons pushing the dhows forward.
The dhows were sewn together with coconut fiber without a single nail, a construction method that produced vessels more flexible in heavy seas than anything nailed together, and which could be repaired with local materials. Across their journey, the sails were lateen-rigged, and the navigation was by the stars and the color and temperature of the water and the behavior of the birds. The captains, many of them from the Hadhramaut or from Oman, had learned the monsoon patterns from childhood.
The volume of cardamom required for a single game was trivial, maybe a few grams. The volume required for a city of qāḍīs playing simultaneously was large. The volume required when the game spread from Rayy to Isfahan, from Isfahan to Shiraz, from Shiraz to Baghdad, from Baghdad to the Jazira, and from the Jazira to the Syrian coast, was enormous.
Al-Rashid found in the Geniza a merchant’s letter, dated approximately 1010 AD, from a Karimī trader in Aden to his partner in Fustat, which contains the following lines:
وسفن الهيل تصل إلى عدن بأعداد لا يسعها الميناء، وقد ارتفع سعر الهيل حتى صار منّ الأخضر يساوي منَّين من الفلفل، ووكلاء بيوت الريّ يتزايدون على الرصيف قبل أن تُفرغ الحمولة، ولست أفهم ماذا يأكلون حتى يحتاجوا إلى هذا القدر.
The hēl ships arrive at Aden in such number now that the harbor cannot contain them, and the price of hēl has risen to where a mann of green is worth two mann of pepper, and the agents of the Rayy houses are bidding against each other on the quay before the cargo is unloaded, and I do not understand what they are eating that requires so much.
They were not eating the cardamom, they were playing with it.
This confusion persisted for centuries. The cardamom entering the trade networks entered at volumes that implied enormous consumption. It could be explained through dietary, pharmaceutical, and industrial use, but it was being routed to a use that had no precedent in any existing model of the economy.
In al-Rashid’s records, whole corridors of Persian commerce bent toward the spice. Cardamom flowed in extraordinary volume through a trade network that existed almost exclusively to price it, ship it, finance it, and insure it. The commodity was being consumed to produce nothing. Without a war to fight or new territories to take, the ships had been repurposed to carry increasingly large loads of the stuff, and the harbors were congested and overfilling and spilling into the bays.
The suftaja, the insurance, the credit, the warehouse receipts: all of it existed to finance the spice. The greatest fortunes in the region were made by merchants who built beautiful homes whose windtowers still tower above the souks, and the apparatus of Indian Ocean commerce mobilized around a product whose end use was a game played by clerics on limestone boards in the afternoons after court.
The trading firms grew enormous on it, and the routes were well secured, and the letters of credit, the suftaja that the Islamic world invented and the Italians later borrowed, served as an early modern example of complex financialization.
The game moved south.
It crossed the Gulf in the holds of dhows alongside the cardamom itself, and it reached the coast of Oman. From Oman it spread into the Hadhramaut, and from the Hadhramaut into the trading posts along the East African littoral, Mogadishu, Kilwa, Sofala, carried by the same merchant networks that carried ivory and gold and slaves in the opposite direction.
But it also moved inland.
The trade routes that cut across the Arabian Peninsula were networks of wells, of caravanserais, of watchtowers, of safe-passage agreements between local tribal authorities, of water rights, of knowledge of where camels could graze and where the wells were salty, and of the adjudication of disputes among travelers. And along these routes in the eleventh century something began to happen that al-Rashid could not fully explain. The caravanserais, the rest stops, the desert inns, the walled compounds where travelers slept and watered their animals, began to expand. They expanded boards.
A caravanserai at the junction of the Hejaz road and the route to the Najd, a place called, in the sources, Qaṣr al-Milḥ, the Salt Palace, though no salt was produced there and the word milḥ may be a corruption of something else, was, according to a tax record from the Fatimid administration in Egypt dated 1031 CE, importing cardamom at a volume that exceeded the combined consumption of the nearest three towns.
The caravanserai had twenty rooms. It was staffed by four men and a cook. It served on an average day perhaps 30 travelers, and the records show it importing cardamom at the rate of a provincial capital.
From a marginal note in the surviving records of a tax official:
وقد أرسلت مفتّشاً إلى قصر الملح للوقوف على سبب التفاوت. فأفاد أن البناء قد وُسّع من جهته الشرقية ببناء من سعف النخل واللبن، مكشوف للهواء، يحوي ألواحاً كثيرة من النوع الموصوف في رسائل الريّ. والمسافرون لا يستريحون ويواصلون سيرهم بل يمكثون أياماً وربما أسابيع، والهيل يُستهلك في الموضع.
I have sent an inspector to Qaṣr al-Milḥ to determine the cause of the discrepancy. He reports that the building has been expanded on its eastern side with a structure of palm-frond and mud-brick, open to the air, containing many boards of the type described in the Rayy dispatches. Travelers do not rest and continue their journey but remain for days, sometimes weeks, and the cardamom is consumed on the premises.
Travelers would stop here in the middle of the desert and never leave.
The original structure was stone, the local limestone that outcrops everywhere in this part of the Central Arabian plateau, a pale yellow stone that turns white in the heat of the sun and gold at sunset. The expansions to the building were built in palm-frond and mud-brick, the cheapest and fastest construction available. The building was the kind of building that the Bedouin would put up in a day and expect to last a little more than a season, but this one lasted decades, because the demand never broke. And the traffic consisted of men who stopped thinking they would stay for a night and then remained for many days.
From above, the structure would have looked accidental. The stone building at the center, rectangular, with its courtyard open to the sky. The palm-frond extension sprawling to the eastern side, ragged and asymmetric, growing outward as demand required it, room added to room with no plan and no geometry. Beyond that extension, further and further rings of tents, the black goat-hair of the Bedouin, but now occupied by men who were not Bedouin, men from the cities, men who came from Basra or Kufa or Medina and who had, upon arrival, put down their loads and sat at the base of the boards and had never stood up again.
The boards were everywhere, in the palm-frond rooms, on carpets spread in the sand, on flat stones dragged from the wadi bed. The cardamom would arrive by caravan, the same caravans that once had carried frankincense and myrrh along these routes, commodities of genuine transcendent purpose, to churches and mosques as offerings to the divine. The cardamom would arrive in sacks and was distributed by a man whom we find recorded in a surviving tax record as al-wazān (الوزان), the weigher. Image of al-wazān (الوزان) from The British Museum
Around the compound, the desert. The Nafūd or the Dahna or some intermediate waste. Al-Rashid was never able to determine the precise location of Qaṣr al-Milḥ, which appears on no surviving map and whose name does not correspond to any known modern site.
In this landscape, miles away from the closest water, under this light, the men would sit at their boards.
In these low-hung temporary buildings, the flat gravel extended to the horizon in every direction, the shimmer of the heat disrupting the light above the ground like waves, the absolute absence of any feature that might orient the eye other than the board itself, that eleven by eleven grid, 121 conditions, and the cascade of consequences that came out of them. The tiny, complete, and answerable world laid out on limestone between their crossed legs.
Moses in Sinai, Christ in the wilderness, Muhammad in the cave of Hira. The desert strips away everything and leaves you alone with yourself and your God. I have felt this, as have many others. But the men at Qaṣr al-Milḥ had found something else in the desert. They were no longer alone. They had the board, and the board was much more responsive than any god. The board would answer you when you moved the cardamom. Our God is silent.
For what happened next in Rayy, one source survives: a letter from the Buyid vizier Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād to the emir of Rayy, which survives in a fourteenth-century anthology of chancery correspondences held at the Topkapı Palace Library. The Ṣāḥib was one of the great figures of the Buyid era, a bibliophile whose personal library was so large that he reportedly refused a diplomatic posting because it would have required more camels than existed on the gulf to transport. He was a patron of scholars, poets, and scientists. And he was terrified.
The letter is dated 994 CE, three years before the vizier’s death, three decades before the Ghaznavid conquest that would sweep the Buyid dynasty into dust.
سيدي، أكتب إليك لأُعلمك بحال لا أجد لها وصفاً إلا أنها وباء، غير أنه لا يقتل أحداً ولا يترك أثراً. فالمحاكم قد خلت بعد صلاة الظهر، وإن كانت الخصومات لا تزال تنتظر الفصل. وكتّاب الأسواق هجروا الدفاتر، والقضاة يجلسون إلى اللوح من الظهر حتى المساء. وبعضهم — وإني لأتردد في كتابة هذا خشية أن يقلقك — يأمرون بإحضار المصابيح ليواصلوا لعبهم حتى ساعة متأخرة من الليل. وقد تجاوز الإنفاق على الهيل الإنفاق على الحبوب في الأحياء الشمالية. وقد تحققت من ذلك مع ضبّاط الجمارك عند الأبواب الذين أروني السجلات. فالهيل الذي يدخل المدينة أكثر من القمح. والمخازن التي كانت تحوي القماش والنحاس صارت تحوي الهيل بكميات تكفي لتتبيل طعام البويهيين بأسرهم لأجيال. لكنه لا يُؤكل. بل يُوضع ويُبلى في الألواح ويُنقل من مربّع إلى مربّع على أيدي رجال إذا قاطعتهم نظروا إليّ كأنني أيقظتهم من حلم بالجنة. ولست أطلب إذنك بمنع اللعبة، إذ لا أظنها تُمنع. وإنما أسألك فقط أن تفهم أن مدينة الريّ التي بناها أبوك وجدّك وأجدادك حتى صارت عاصمة حضارتنا، يستهلكها شيء أعظم منّا جميعاً.
My lord, I write to inform you of a condition which I can describe only as a plague, though it kills no one and leaves no mark. The courts are empty after the noon prayer, though disputes still await adjudication. The clerks in the markets have abandoned the registers, and the judges sit at the board from noon until evening, and some of them - I hesitate to write this, lest it disturb you - have lamps brought so they can continue playing late into the night. The expenditure on cardamom has exceeded the expenditure on grain in the northern districts. I have confirmed this with the customs officers at the gates, who have shown me the tallies. More cardamom enters the city than wheat. The warehouses that once held cloth and copper now hold cardamom in quantities sufficient to spice the food of the Buyid lands for generations. But it is not being eaten. It is being placed and worn into boards and moved from square to square by men who, when I interrupt them, look at me as though I have woken them from a dream of paradise. I do not ask your permission to ban the game, for I do not believe it can be banned. I ask only that you understand that the city of Rayy, which your father and your grandfather and your forefathers built into the seat of our civilization, is being consumed by something beyond any of us.
The emir did not ban the game. His response is lost to the sand, but history does record that ʿAḍud al-Dawla ordered the construction of new and elegant gaming courts on the grounds of the royal palace, with roofs to protect the boards from wind, lit with oil lamps such that play could continue long into the dark, and staffed these courts with servants whose sole function was to replenish the cardamom and carry away the waste, the degraded powders swept into basins, discarded into wadis far outside the city walls.
The Ṣāḥib saw the danger more clearly than the emir.
The qāḍīs had spent their careers developing precisely the faculties the game required: the ability to hold complex systems in their heads, to anticipate consequences two and three steps out, to read ambiguous conditions, and to make binding decisions under uncertainty. The game used those faculties in ways that governance never could. The game answered you. Within minutes, the consequences of a decision were visible on the board. Governance never answered like that. The game was governance perfected and emptied, a closed system with the complexity of the open one and none of its consequences.
Maṣlaḥa in Islamic jurisprudence is the public interest, the welfare that law exists to protect. Al-Ghazali formalized it into five categories: the protection of religion, of life, of intellect, of lineage, and of property. These are the maqāṣid al-sharīʿa (مقاصد الشريعة), the purposes of the law, and rulings in courts from Córdoba to Samarkand existed to protect them.
The game had no maṣlaḥa. It protected nothing and served nothing and it preserved no religion, no life, no intellect, no lineage, and no property. It was, in the technical language of Islamic law, ʿabath (العبث), frivolous, pointless, an activity without purpose. And ʿabath is, in the sharīʿa, considered spiritually dangerous because it occupies the faculties that were given to man for the purposes of tending creation and redirects them toward nothing.
The Sufis called the highest spiritual state fanāʾ (فناء), the annihilation of the self in God. Why not be utterly transformed into fire?
The game produced a fanāʾ without God. Eleven by eleven, 121 positions, a cascade of conditions that felt like creation unfolding but contained no divine presence.
حتى يظنّ العبد أنه يعبد وهو إنما يعدّ.
So that the servant believes he is worshipping when he is only counting.
In a footnote in her unpublished graduate thesis, al-Rashid proposes that the Rub’ al-Khali itself, the Empty Quarter, the largest continuous sand desert on Earth, with 650,000 square kilometers of sand so deep and so dry that no human habitation has ever been sustained within it in recorded history, is not entirely natural.
The geological history of the Rub’ al-Khali is well documented. The region was slightly wetter in the Holocene. Lakes existed and rivers flowed. The desertification was gradual, driven by the northward retreat of the monsoons, and the process was essentially complete by 3500 years before the prophet’s birth. By the time of the Islamic conquest, the Empty Quarter was what it is now: a desert so hostile to crossing that it was considered, until Philby and Thomas in the 1930s, a feat of borderline suicidal ambition by anyone other than the Bedouin who made the margins of the Quarter their home.
Al-Rashid proposes that the Quarter is empty in part because the cultures that bordered it made it unenterable. The Bedouin of the Murri, the Rashidi, the ʿAjmān, and the Manāhīl grazed their camels on the Quarter’s margins and rarely penetrated its interior. They avoided the deep desert for its physical hostility, but also for something in their cultural memory about what had been happened there.
When a Bedouin says a place is ḥarām, forbidden, sacred, dangerous, he is usually describing a feature of the environment that has been observed and recorded in the tribal memory: a well that produces only salt, a pass where flash floods could kill, a depression where sandstorms could trap you.
But the taboo around the deep Rub’ al-Khali, al-Rashid suggests, may mean something else. A human danger. A place where men went and did not come back, because they found something in the sand they could not leave.
The forty-seven boards that al-Rashid found at Wādī al-Hīl were littered among camel bones, pottery fragments, lamps, and deposits of compressed cardamom two feet deep, the evidence of sustained habitation.
And whatever happened here was bad enough to bury. The sand buries everything. But the burial was also cultural: the tribes that lived on the margins remembered. What they remembered was not specific. They remembered that this was a place you do not go. They told their children and their children told their children, and the memory became taboo. The Valley of the Trick, the empty place, the place where the jinn live. The word they would have used, the word S. might have used if Philby had pressed him, which Philby, to his credit, did not, was jinn. The place was inhabited by the jinn.
Jinn in the Quran are a separate creation, made of smokeless fire. They inhabit the margins - deserts, ruins, places where civilization retreated. They are attracted to the emptiness that remains after something has been used up.
Al-Rashid’s footnote ends with a single sentence.
Perhaps the Bedouin remembered no spirit at all, but an industry: men, boards, spice, waste, and a purpose so empty it made the place forbidden.
I have walked in parts of the Rub’ al-Khali. Not the deep interior. But I have walked the northern margins, near the edge of the Dahna, where the red sand meets the gravel plateau. The Rub’ al-Khali feels exhausted, as though whatever was here has been used up and the sand is covering what remained.
Maybe they remember the exhaustion. They remember land that was once the site of an intensity so total that the intensity itself modified the topology, that the camps and the game boards were as real as the dunes and as real as the flats and as real as the sabkha, where groundwater rises and evaporates and leaves a crust of crystals that crunch under your feet like walking on bones. The game did not make the sand. It made the taboo.
The tribes that border the Rub’ al-Khali have stories about why you do not go there, and they share a shape: men went into the desert and found something they could not leave.
She arrived at Wādī al-Hīl in 1982 with a small team from SOAS and a permit from the Saudi Department of Antiquities that had taken her three years to obtain. The wadi was a natural formation, but one so extensively modified as to be nearly unrecognizable. The limestone banks had been carved. Flat surfaces had been prepared and leveled. Steps had been cut into the stone, leading down to a wide, level floor where the stream had once run.
On the floor, she found forty-seven gaming boards.
They were arranged in rows, eight across, oriented north to south. Each board was identical: eleven by eleven, 121 depressions, and the same amber-brown cardamom residue bonded into the stone. The boards were separated by narrow channels, not for water, she realized, but for the drainage of excess cardamom powder, which would have accumulated on the floor as the wind disturbed the playing surfaces. The channels led to a central basin at the western end of the wadi, and in that basin she found a deposit of compressed cardamom nearly two feet deep.
Then she found other things. Fragments of glazed pottery. Nishapur ware with Kufic calligraphy, shattered and half-buried. Copper fittings from oil lamps. Glass fragments from vessels that once held, based on residue analysis, a date wine, nabīdh نبيذ, which was impermissible under every school of Islamic law other than the Hanafi.
And she found bones.
They were not human bones, but camel bones, hundreds of them. The camels had been eaten on site and their bones discarded in a midden at the eastern end of the wadi. The volume of bones suggested a permanent or semi-permanent encampment. People had lived here in the desert, in the core of the Empty Quarter, in a carved wadi in the middle of nothing, for the purpose of playing the game.
The lamps guttering and the cardamom running low. The last caravan delayed, or turned back, or swallowed into the desert, or never sent because the suftaja had stopped clearing and the merchants in Aden had moved on to something else. The men at their boards, their white robes stained with cardamom dust and their fingers amber-brown from thousands of games, looking up from the grid and seeing, perhaps for the first time in months or years, the desert around them. The Milky Way was so bright and so dense that it cast a shadow. They looked up at those stars and then looked down at the board and saw, in the grid of 121 positions, a pattern that was more legible than the sky.
And then one of them, I imagine an old qāḍī from Rayy or Isfahan or Shiraz, a man who had once adjudicated disputes in a great city and had traveled five hundred miles into the desert to play a game here, would have made the last move. He would have lifted a pinch of green cardamom from one depression and placed it in another and watched the cascade unfold, watched it arrive at its own conclusion, and stood up. Or maybe he did not stand up, because the next game was starting, and the lamps were already guttering, and the stars were bright enough to play by, and the cardamom was running low, but there was maybe enough for one more game, one more cascade, one more unfolding of a world that answered when the real world did not.
Al-Rashid died in 1984. Her manuscript, titled simply Al-Lawḥ اللوح, was deposited at SOAS. It has been checked out twice in forty years.
The sand filled the wadis and the boards were buried, and the cardamom residue bonded with the stone, and the Bedouin who lived on the margins remembered that this was a place you do not go. They told their children and their children told their children, and the memory became taboo. The Valley of the Trick, the empty place, the place where the jinn live, the scar in the desert where something that was played out consumed the men who played it and left behind only residue, only the amber-brown stain in the limestone, only the smell.
And the smell of cardamom in the desert is a strange thing, a sweet thing, a thing that has no business being in a landscape so hostile. A thing the wind carries for miles across the gravel plains and the Bedouin smell sometimes in the early morning, when the air is still cool and the dew has settled on the stones, and the ghosts of the game rise from the ground like smoke from a fire extinguished long ago. They have no choice but to turn their face away.
Rayy fell. Not because of the game. Rayy fell because the Ghaznavids had cavalry and ambition and the Buyids had neither. The game did not cause the fall. The game merely ensured that when the cavalry arrived to sack the city, the men who should have been governing were somewhere else, moving small piles of cardamom from square to square on a board that felt better than the world outside.
The lamps were still lit when the horses came.
The Bedouin call it khālī (خالي), empty. But khālī shares a root with khalā, to be alone, to be free, to be vacant. And khalā is also the word the Sufis use for the spiritual retreat, the withdrawal from the world into solitude for the purpose of encountering God.
لا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله
There is no power and no strength except through God.