Pokémon Go players use smartphones to walk through communities and other areas to find special locations and animated characters in a treasure hunt-style game that relies on Global Positioning System technology.
Advertisement
Saudi Arabian religious leaders have updated an edict from 2001 to ban the playing of the mobile phone virtual reality game “Pokemon Go” in the kingdom.
Firstly, the game is seen as a form of gambling, which itself is forbidden.
By Monday, Pokemon Go had been downloaded millions of times, topping rankings at official online shops for applications tailored for smartphones powered by Apple or Google-backed Android software. It also uses images of triangles that are associated with freemasonry.
The Pokemon game was un-Islamic as it contains polytheism, said the edict, without specifically referring to the popular smartphone app.
Further, the game can encourage gambling – presumably in reference to the game’s micro transactions, which lets people pay real money for in-game currency. It isn’t clear that the sheikh has actually played Pokemon Go, which takes numerous same characteristics and aims of the original Pokemon but assembles them around an entirely different engine, having people move about in the real world rather than a virtual one.
Despite such a cool reception by the governments of some countries, the augmented reality game is popular in the Middle East, being played by thousands in Dubai, Kuwait, and Israel.
Advertisement
According to the Arab News, the General Secretariat of the Council of Senior Scholars, on the website of the General Presidency for Scholarly Research and Ifta, has explicitly renewed the fatwa of the Standing Committee for Issuing Fatwas banning the controversial mobile game. Al-Azhar Undersecretary Abbas Shumman said users can lose their sense of reality and endanger themselves while playing.
