Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Journalist and science fiction writer Frank Herbert’s Dune epic has many themes. One is, clearly, environmentalism and the need for humans to adapt to their environment. Another is the struggle between regimented bureaucratic civilization and individualism. Yet another is the temptation to use religion for liberatory purposes.
The Denis Villeneuve Dune films signal that the Fremen Bedouins of the desert planet Arrakis are “Muslim” in various ways, including casting Arab Muslims, shooting in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and the use of Arabic vocabulary, drawing from the Herbert novels. The films have been charged with playing down the Muslim-ness of the Fremen, and perhaps there is somewhat less Arabic in their language and less reference to their religion (which in the novels is ZenSunni). But I think the visual vocabulary of the films makes pretty clear that the Fremen are some sort of descendants, at least, of old earth Muslims.
We are seeing the films in a different context than the one in which the 1965 novel appeared. It is a Cold War novel (as I will explain below). We are now watching it in the wake of the Bush “War on Terror” (against Muslims) to which the Republican Party and elements of the Democratic Party in the US are still committed. For this reason, the films do not use the term “jihad,” translating it inaccurately as “crusade” (ironic!) or “holy war,” in contrast to the Herbert novels. Jihad is a sacred word for Muslims, meaning to exert oneself or struggle for the faith in all sorts of ways– ethically, by donations to charities, by speaking out. It can also refer to taking up arms at the order of legitimate political authority to defend the country. Americans might call it “patriotism.”
We are also watching the second film in the the duology during Israel’s war on Gaza, and it is difficult not to see the Fremen as Palestinians. At least it was difficult for me not to see it in that context, though of course Villeneuve could not have predicted this moment when he and his team were shooting.
The massive firepower and awful destructiveness of the Harkonnen forces recall the intensive aerial bombardment pursued by the Israeli Air Force for five months. The Palestinians of Gaza are not Bedouin tribespeople, of course, but highly urbanized and literate. Still, the search for a religious and political deliverance from a brutal Israeli occupation led them to the fundamentalist Hamas, a dead end. In today’s political atmosphere in the United States, the only sort of resistance against occupation that can be lionized is fictional, in Dune and James Cameron’s Avatar films. Despite their own progenitors’ revolution against King George’s despotism, the majority of Americans nowadays, according to opinion polls, have a knee-jerk tendency to identify with the occupiers and not the freedom fighters.
Warner Bros. Video: “Dune: Part Two | Official Trailer 3”
For those who have not read the book or seen the film, I should give a brief plot summary. A set of planets, each ruled by a Siridar or planetary governor with a noble rank such as duke or baron, owe fealty to an emperor, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. They form of council of nobles, the Landsraad. Flying spaceships between these imperial planets requires pilots to ingest a psychedelic drug, melange or the “spice,” produced by fungus in the sands exposed to effluvia from young sandworms on the desert planet of Arrakis. The vocabulary here is Islamicate. Padishah is Persian for emperor. Shaddam has the morphology of an Arabic word and may be modeled on Saddam (though not the Iraqi one). Siridar is from the Persian sardar or governor.
Shaddam IV grows concerned about the growing influence on the Landsraad of Duke Leto Atreides of the lush planet of Caladan, and fears Leto may make a play for the throne. He therefore forces him off Caladan and orders him to rule the arid Arrakis instead. In this alien environment, Leto is vulnerable. The emperor puts Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the Siridar of Giedi Prime, up to attacking the House Atreides on Arrakis, and secretly provides imperial Sardaukar troops to help in the assault. Leto is killed but his concubine, Lady Jessica and his son, Paul, escape to the desert and find refuge with the Fremen, tribal desert dwellers. Jessica belongs to a religious order, the Bene Gesserit, who engage in genetic engineering, and Paul is a result of this experiment (though he was supposed to be a girl).
Among the Fremen, Paul is given the personal name Usul (Arabic for “principles,” “foundations”) and the title Muad’Dhib (Arabic mu’addib, one who teaches culture). Paul Atreides, by imbibing the liquid derived from killing and harvesting a young Sandworm, gains superpowers, including prescience, and becomes accepted by the Fremen as their messiah or Mahdi (Arabic for “guided one”). He initially resists the temptation to lead them, seeing visions of a vast murderous horde conquering the known universe if he takes that course. But the Harkonnen attacks back him and the Fremen into a corner, and ultimately he takes on the mantle of the Mahdi, the “tongue of the Unseen” (Arabic lisan al-ghayb). He leads the Fremen in a campaign to overthrow the Harkonnens, and to subordinate the emperor himself.
I first read the book, I think, in 1967 when I was an army brat on a base in Africa. It had won a Hugo award the year before. Like many adolescents of my era, I found the story mesmerizing. We all wanted to be Paul Atreides; Denis Villeneuve, 15 years my junior, admits that the same was true for him. I didn’t understand then that Paul Atreides is an anti-hero, who becomes a monster to fight monsters.
Herbert was deeply influenced by T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which a minor British intelligence official and amateur archeologist depicted himself as the true leader of the Arab Revolt during WW I, in which the Hashemite leaders of Mecca rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. In return for their opening of an internal front against the Ottomans in alliance with Britain, London promised the Hashemites an Arab kingdom that would have encompassed what are now Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, Syria and Iraq (the British may have excluded Christians in Mt. Lebanon from the deal). The sons of Sharif Hussain, Faisal and Abdullah, were of course the actual leaders of the revolt, and were joined by many other Arab chieftain, officers and intellectuals. The predecessors of MI6 and James Bond were embedded with them, but weren’t all that consequential. After the war, the British roundly screwed over their Arab allies, giving Palestine to the Zionists, greater Syria to the French, and colonized Iraq themselves. The British government (both major parties) are still dedicated to screwing over the Palestinians.
Herbert was also inspired by Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise (1960), which recounted the story of the rebellion by Caucasus Muslims against the Russian Empire after it conquered them in the nineteenth century. They were led by Shāmil of Daghestan, a Sufi.
Haris Durrani wonders why Herbert, a Republican, was so open to multi-culturalism and psychedelics, but this bewilderment is anachronistic. Herbert was a fierce environmentalist, as many Republicans were in the 1960s and 1970s. Nixon passed the Clean Air and Water acts. Herbert had Libertarian tendencies, like Libertarian science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who was also very interested in drugs for expanded consciousness. And Herbert hated bureaucracy and big government.
Here’s the thing. In the Cold War era, for Libertarians the ultimate symbol of big government was the Soviet Union. And in that era, conservatives saw Muslims as allies against international Communism. The Eisenhower administration was afraid Muslims would secularize and go Communist, so it actually appropriated funds to encourage pilgrimage to Mecca by improving rail links to the holy city.
Much later, Ronald Reagan (whom Herbert admired) allied with the Afghan Mujahidin, about half of whom were fundamentalists, against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
So Herbert’s symbolic deployment of Muslim Bedouins against the iron law of bureaucracy and Big Government (with the Soviets as the biggest of big governments) was actually entirely in character.
The wrinkle is that Herbert was at the same time very nervous about such alliances with religious groups against the Soviet Union, because he feared their irrational tendencies and their coercive power. One of the strengths of Dune is that there are not really any heroes. There are just bad choices. Shaddam IV tried to centralize power and reduce the power of the nobles, destroying Leto Atreides for his despotism. Paul Muad’Dhib Atreides could only fight back by enlisting the Fremen. But in so doing he distorted the Fremen ethic of a kind of humanist egalitarianism, turning them into fanatical zealots and unleashing interplanetary war. People who see the story as fascist don’t understand that it isn’t an endorsement of either of these two extremes but a critique of them, a sigh of despair by someone who believes in liberty and the individual and fears the arc of reality is going in bureaucratic and authoritarian directions instead. I have argued that it is a Libertarian critique of the 1950s, not a celebration of dictatorship.
Herbert clearly admired much in Islam and its history and culture. It was, in specific, Mahdist movements that aroused his simultaneous fascination and distrust. In this regard, Herbert’s Orientalism is distasteful, since of course many Muslims have waged political campaigns for liberty without surrendering to those impulses. Algerians freed themselves from France without becoming Mahdists, and their revolution looks like a lot of other decolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s, whether in Indonesia or largely Christian Kenya.
Ironically, the biggest force for a messianic fanaticism in today’s world is the US Republican Party, so it turns out that the contemporary face of the Fremen fundamentalists is Donald John Trump. Herbert would have been a never-Trumper. One only hopes that our American fanatics don’t pull us into their holy wars.
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