Stop Making Dune "Islamic." It isn't.

Curb your aesthetic enthusiasm.

Lately, due to the release of the second Dune movie, controversial discussions have sparked up once again about a story deemed to most science fiction authors as a defining classic that inspired many future tropes in the genre, as well as the archetypes of characters and storylines that give a great model not in storytelling itself per say, but in worldbuilding and; where the story truly shines in my view, how to “steal like an artist” the way Austin Kleon describes it — a great case study on how to get away with building a story heavily inspired by lore that isn’t your own. The Song of Ice and Fire series and Lord of the Rings are also each seen in this manner (ASOIAF being inspired by various medieval European royal families, and LotR inspired by old Norse-Germanic mythology).

Many of my friends and I, including those who are writers as well, all admit that we were initially quite impressed by Dune when we first read it. I discovered when speaking to some Muslims older than I that bookworms at the time felt it was the first instance of “mainstream representation” for Islamic ideas and culture. Even today, one of the biggest push backs against the Dune movies was that they were being “whitewashed” of their so-called Islamic inspiration. As time went on, I realized the problems with calling it “Islamic” in any sense, in particular the message it was sending regarding the Islamic-inspired story elements it was using. Herbert was on to something with the setting itself, but the problem lay in how he portrayed the fate of the characters relative to the spirituality and story beats he was trying to convey. The result is irreconcilable problems for any rational Muslim reader of the series who mistakenly thinks it’s a genuine work of admiration of our traditions and ideas, instead of what it really is; a confirmation of the old and lasting biases made of Muslims and traditional cultures. A disclaimer is needed that this isn’t related to the quality of Dune as a standalone work of literature. The following is a thesis and interpretation of why these problems exist in Dune for us, and not a one-to-one sourcing of Frank Herbert’s stated intentions when writing the series. What I’m against is the attachment many literary-inclined Muslims have towards a story that only hurts future prospects for real Islamic fiction and storytelling.

Dune was published in 1965. This is three years after the Algerians fought a brutal war for their independence from France, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and a demographic transfer that remains controversial in many circles to this day. The Muslim perspective was a sense of pride in our martyrs for the sake of Allah, as this was a necessary and glorious win for Islam worldwide (granting Algeria the title of the Land of a Million Martyrs). The French occupation of Algeria was one of the last remaining European colonies after all — it had been years since Libya, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, etc. all (technically) gained states of their own. It had reached the point that many parties in the United States, even, were agitating for Algerian liberation and urging France to let go of an imperial practice that their Anglo-Saxon cousins up north had forsaken just recently. With this sentiment penetrating the hearts of both liberal, anti-colonial Westerners and spiritually connected Muslims across the Middle East alike, the media view of tan-skinned Algerians as cool and rogue guerilla warriors leading a righteous revolt against colonial oppressors was easy to give away to the masses.

Frank Herbert being among those inspired by this underdog story of “desert rebels” fighting for liberation is undeniable. The famous war cry from Paul Atreides in the novel, Yahya Elchouhada (Long Live the Martyrs), comes directly from a newspaper article at the time describing what a journalist there heard shouted from the fighters after their victory. You also see heavy inspiration drawn from Lesley Blanch’s biography of Imam Shamil, the Avar leader of the Chechens against Imperial Russia, Sabres of Paradise (1960), for the formation of the culture of the Fremen, showing many details that were sometimes taken out whole cloth for use in Dune. Chakobsa, the hunting language, is copied as a concept directly for use in the story. “May thy Kindjal Rust” becomes “May thy knife chip and shatter”, and so on.

Of course, Herbert couldn’t translate Elchouhada directly as “the martyrs” because, I suspect, he knew that a Western audience couldn’t understand this concept of martyrdom at a deep, epistemic level the way Oriental and Asian cultures immersed in Islamic theology understood it. There is a less common phenomena that’s the opposite polar end of “Islamophobia” (a term we’re yet to replace with something better), of “Islamophilia” which is at risk of misinterpreting Islamic ideas and metaphysics much more than hating it does — love being blind, but on a more macro scale. Yukio Mishima once described the non-Japanese understanding of Japanese culture as only admiring the Chrysanthemum and missing the Sword (a difficulty Paul Schrader faced when making his movie about Mishima’s life, particularly in portraying his dramatic seppuku suicide to a Western audience). With many Islamic cultures, it’s the same thing — outsiders love the aesthetics and the freedom of the sand dunes, but the truth of the scimitar — what it really means, terrifies them.

Even though there wouldn’t be a worldwide “anti-Jihad” reign of media terror for four more decades, the idea of throwing your life away in a gruesome battle for a divinely promised afterlife was still seen in most of the developed world as outlandish, exotic, and completely non-Western — a sentiment that prevails to this day, where dying of AIDs as a closeted homosexual is seen as more worthy of the Western definition of martyrdom in modern popular culture than the foreign fighters in Afghanistan who died in the Jihad against the Soviet Union.

If Frank Herbert really wanted to go this route of writing a science fiction chronicle that had Eastern religious and mystical commentary (which was also inspired by his time in Oregon and psychedelic mushroom use, both leading to the Arrakis-like environment and spice drug in the story), he needed to make the story more relatable to a Western audience in this vital, mythological sense. To any learned Muslim, they recognize immediately that, with the knowledge of Dune being an “Islamically inspired” story, the tale of a messianic prophet guiding a desert people onto liberation and conquest of the outer world seems awfully similar to the Orientalist view of the Seerah of the Prophet (SAW).

This is where the big diversion from the true Islamic pattern happens — in the actual Seerah, our Prophet Muhammad (SAW) is a man from among those he preaches to and guides. Those who rejected him most violently were people who knew him from the day he was born; becoming a favored man recognized for his elite lineage and reputation of the utmost pristine character long before he received revelation. In Dune however, Paul Muad’Dib is an outsider to the Fremen. They’re awaiting a messiah to liberate them and lead them to conquer galaxies, but unlike the semitic tradition of prophethood (remember the shock of the Jews of Medina that the Prophet (SAW) was who he was, yet was not Jewish), are somehow open to the idea that it’s not another Fremen, and instead a foreigner who doesn’t know the depth of their lineages, traditions, and ancestral mythologies. For the sake of the story and Herbert emphasizing his environmental obsessions as well, Paul even comes from a tropical water planet that’s the exact opposite of the barren Arrakis. The only thing that separates him from the Harkonnen is that he’s imperially benevolent.

Paul’s story in the first Dune book is much more akin to the Indo-European story trope that belies the ancient tales and mythologies referred to in the canon of the ancient world, and thus the core of Western civilization that doesn’t experience Oriental influence until much later. In the Indo-European myth, a foreign hero of great might and a capacity for taming animals (The Atreides, descendants of the Greek king Agamemnon from the Iliad, wrestle bulls) invade and take charge of a people under religious or mythological pretense, transforms them, then launches an outward conquest on their neighbors. Sometimes this is done by two brothers (as is the case with ancient Rome) as well. Dune, at its core, is a Western story in an Eastern setting and world, based around a tale that unfortunately breaks with the values that caused his inspiration in the first place.

Though I doubt Herbert thought this deeply about it, this is why many readers who are part of the cultures he takes inspiration from feel the story is self-contradictory and out of place. A more uncharitable interpretation is that Dune insults the idea of Abrahamic Prophethood and Jihad in the first place by making the religious justifications for it in its own lore so loose and vaguely defined. In the first book, none of the functions of the lore or the characters behave in accordance with belief in the unseen other than the clueless Fremen. Everything in the nihilistic world of Dune has a scientific explanation, or a hidden plot of betrayal, or a drug induced hallucination, or a set of myths that are explicitly said to be implanted as a centuries long psy-op (the Bene Gesserit). Paul Atreides isn’t ever intrigued or guided by divine forces that cause him to make decisions which seem irrational in the moment but pan out later as ordained by a fate greater than himself. The Fremen, though have deep ancestral beliefs with regard to the worms and spice, have no daily rituals of “connecting to the divine” that attach them to that belief. They’re a tribal people, constantly high on a mystical drug, who abide by a primitive and barbarian way of life far more akin to how pre-Islamic cultures acted — like the Pashtun, Caucasian mountainfolk, Turks, and Arabs pre-Islam.

It’s worth addressing another view some friends of mine hold — that Dune is good because it makes the concept of imperial jihad cool and palatable to Westerners. My only response is that the second book, which I’m assuming many don’t read, literally goes right against this sentiment. A central theme in Dune Messiah, where the story launches away from any of the inspirations that made up its first book, is that Paul regrets and reneges on the Jihad he initiated, seeing his “evil prophecy” and ideas go too far and is hijacked by zealousness and Fremen lunacy. It’s hard not to see how this goes in parallel with the modernist idea that the only “good Muslims” are those who only take 70% of their faith where Jihad is only “personal struggle” seriously, or implying that our spiritual leadership would have doubts about this aspect of the religion if they were more prescient.

This doesn’t take away from the story itself, as it became Herbert’s own thing. The problem is today, Dune is constantly referred to by cultural critics and — foolishly, many Muslims — as a story that positively reflects the ontology and archetypes of the Islamic story and universal goal for mankind. All you’re doing by promoting Dune in this way is confirming every orientalist stereotype used by our enemies in the media to constrict us into a bubble of their choosing. If Frank Herbert’s goal was to actually drive interest to Islam and the cultures it created (it wasn’t), then Dune in that respect does a terrible job, and the only reason Muslims are attached to it still in this way is due to a lack of their own fictional mediums and media lore. It’s a cry of desperation and desire for their own thing, not true pride in a work of art that does us justice. Another great point my editor Samiha made is it’s the perfect way for mainstream publishers to constantly refer Muslim authors, agents, etc. to a “safe alternative” to a truly Islamic story whenever they come upon anything in one that makes them uncomfortable or is politically incorrect.

The way you get past this, however, isn’t by crying about “cultural appropriation”. It isn’t by throwing a fit because Americans want to wear “Dune-style” long robes, or demanding that Zionist publishing houses with quotas to fill conform to our moral codes. It’s by working to establish and improve the Islamic Secular, in short, by building our own media that isn’t defined by reaction or ethnic resentment. Our inspirations and the “root” to the unexplored treasure trove of Muslim stories in a modern world lie in our own books and history, not in the imaginations of those unconvinced of our ideals in the first place.