Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Magic of Scheherazade: The First Islamic Nintendo Game

I confess my fondest memory of the Nintendo Entertainment System was not, like many other people, The Legend of Zelda.  It was a video game with a title I couldn't pronounce until the librarian called my house to inform me it was overdue.  "Sheh-her-ezad."  It was addictive, it used passwords instead of the memory, which was great because I didn't actually own it.
I didn't think about how Muslim it was until much, much later.  It doesn't stop it from being a fun game.  Don't believe it's Islamic?  Here's a few relevant points:
1:  "MOSCOM":  I've never seen Aladdin go to a mosque.  This isn't just an Arabian knights homage.  Every time you return from the dead, want to heal, or get a password, you crawl, on your knees, up the staircase of a mosque.  There's an actual spell that you cast that makes a mosque appear anywhere:  MOSCOM.  
2.  Star and Crescent Motif:  Look around.  Lots of star symbols, moon symbols, crescent symbols.  The Star of David, in contrast, is a symbol for magic, and a Magician in this game is not the same thing as a Saint.
3.  Arabian names, such as Hassan.
4.  Turbans.  Enough said.
5.  Mashroob (not to be confused with mushroom):  The Arabic word for "drink".  I looked it up:  Apparently in the Islamic heaven, everyone drinks some sort of ginger smoothie.  I personally think ginger root tastes gross, but whatever.  The point is that it serves the same purpose as manna in other video games.  Although not specifically stated that it is, in fact, ginger mashroob, it probably is.
6.  Harem girls:  You're rescuing a group of women who wear face coverings and head coverings, in a world where women wear face coverings and head coverings.  Not only that, there's a character that thinks very poorly of you if you pick up a girl at a hamburger stand.  It seems that a noble prince of Arabia isn't supposed to date women who have jobs and maybe don't cover their head and face.  Or maybe it's because a noble Muslim woman wouldn't be caught making cheeseburgers because it's against Qur'an?  Okay, I'm reaching, but I still don't understand why the character has such a beef against burger joints.  If the prince is a generous tipper and the Red Robin waitress likes him, so what?
And you wonder why I was such a confused, mixed up kid.

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