Today's online edition of The National, an English language publication from the United Arab Emirates, features a report that a group of top Saudi clerics have issued a fatwa (or rather, extended an existing one from 2001) against Muslims playing the inexplicably popular time wasting game, Pokemon GO.

Because, you see, among other things, it's "Masonic."

First issued in 2001 when Pokemon was played with cards, the decree says the game violates Islamic prohibitions against gambling, uses devious Masonic-like symbols and promotes “forbidden images". The fatwa has reappeared in a ticker on the home page of the kingdom’s portal for official religious decrees.

Sheikh Saleh Al Fozan, a member of the kingdom’s ultraconservative council of senior clerics, said the current version of the game is the same as the old one.

The edict notes that a six-pointed star in the game, for example, is associated with the state of Israel and that certain triangular symbols hold important meanings for the Freemasonry. Crosses in the game are a symbol of Christianity, while other symbols are associated with polytheism, says the edict.

[snip]

The game is popular in the Middle East and many gamers have downloaded the app though it’s not been officially released regionally.

A senior official at Egypt’s Al Azhar, the pre-eminent seat of Sunni scholarship in the Muslim world, has also spoken out against the game. Al Azhar undersecretary Abbas Shumman said users can lose their sense of reality and endanger themselves while playing, adding that a “manic attachment to technology" can also make people forgetful toward worship and prayer.

Other articles from Middle Eastern countries have condemned the game's "Pokestops" that appear in mosques. There's been no shortage of inappropriate locations that maniacal players have been led to, including the interior of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.





Freemasons all over the world have been reportedly discovering "Pokestops" in their lodge buildings, and many have expressed unbridled excitement that swarms of complete strangers have suddenly shown up on their doorsteps without knowing (or caring) exactly where they were. I suspect some grand lodge committee somewhere is now industriously working up an official protocol for answering questions about the fraternity and seeing to it that petitions are thrust into oblivious players' hands before they can rush out the door in search of their next Pokestop (or get promptly plowed into by an unobservant Uber driver).