So Saudi Arabia has made a flashy welcoming move by allowing women not wearing neither the hijab nor the abaya on occasion of the King Salman World Rapid & Blitz Chess Championships scheduled to be held in ar-Riyāḍ (Riyadh) from 26 to 30 December 2017. This has been understandably welcomed as a success of the “diplomacy of chess” and might sound like a death knell to the “boycott activists”. Indian Grandmaster Dronavalli Harika (the number 11 woman in the world), for instance, thinks that “this agreement by FIDE and the organisers in Saudi Arabia is a positive development”, and doesn’t exclude that the current Women’s World Champion both in Rapid and Blitz, Anna Olehivna Muzychuk of Ukraine, may reconsider her decision to not took part in the Championships. “She had written that post a week ago and FIDE’s agreement with the organisers came after that”, Harika told P.K. Ajith Kumar of The Hindu.
As they say, who will live will see. |
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