CAIRO — “War is young men dying and old men talking,” Odysseus tells Achilles in the 2004 cinematic masterpiece "Troy." In Egypt, this can easily be paraphrased as, "Online war games are young men playing and old men talking," due to recurrent debates over video warfare games.

After the controversy over the online game "Blue Whale" earlier this year, Egyptians are debating whether to impose a legal ban on the popular game "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds," or "PUBG," and to have a fatwa declaring it as "haram."

Head of the parliamentary Communications and Information Technology Committee Ahmed Badawy, along with several other parliamentarians, already demanded the ban of the online game in November. Badawy urged the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) to block the game in Egypt on the grounds that it incites the youths to violence.

Similarly, Al-Azhar, the highest Islamic authority in the country, has declared the game as haram and urged parents and teachers to keep their children away from it, though the authority fell short of issuing a fatwa.