Imaginary Worlds - The Book of Dune

Episode Date: July 12, 2017

Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune and its sequels tackled a lot of big themes. The books are about ecology. They're about journeys of self-realization through mind-altering substances. But religion is at the core of the series, since the main character Paul Atreides transforms from a teenage aristocrat into a messianic revolutionary leader of a nomadic desert tribe. And the real world religion that Frank Herbert borrows from the most is Islam. Khalid Baheyeldin, Salman Sayyid, and Sami Shah discuss why the book resonated deeply with them, despite the fact that Frank Herbert wasn't Muslim. And Liel Liebowitz explains why the novel even spoke to him as an Israeli.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Without a doubt, the single most requested topic I get for this podcast is Dune. And after a while, I started thinking, I should really read this book. I mean, it's a classic, and I'd never read it before.

I did know a few things about it. I knew it was written in the mid-1960s by Frank Herbert, who was an American writer, and he wrote several sequels before he died in the 80s. And most of the books revolve around a planet called Arrakis, but its nickname is Dune because the planet is a desert. Dune is only one natural resource, and it is a desert. Dune is only one natural resource, a spice called melange that people can also ingest like a drug and have mind-altering trippy experiences. Harvesting melange is very dangerous because it is surrounded by monstrously huge sandworms. And the reason I know all this

is because I remember watching the preview for David Lynch's adaptation from 1984. And that's the other thing I knew about Dune. There has never been a good movie made of it. That movie was a bomb. David Lynch was very unhappy with it. Even stranger, 10 years earlier in the 1970s, the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to get a version made that would have starred Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dali with music by Pink Floyd. There's actually a documentary about his failed attempt to get Dune made. I have offered to you the most important picture in the story of the humanity.

And Dune, by the way, is back in development. Denis Villeneuve, who directed Arrival and the new Blade Runner sequel, is attached to direct, but we'll see how that goes. So with all this hype and all these requests, I felt like I should finally sit down and read this book. And at first, I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. The main character is a 15-year-old boy named Paul Atreides. He's the son of a duke. His father's arch nemesis is a baron from a family called the Harkonnens. And after 100 pages, I'm thinking,

is this just a futuristic soap opera with, like, a good royal family versus a bad royal family? And then, major spoiler alert, the story gets really interesting when Paul's father is murdered and Paul and his mother Jessica are left for dead on the desert planet. They survive with the help of the Fremen,

a nomadic tribe who believe that Paul is their Messiah. Now Paul has been genetically bred to have mental powers so he can see how every choice that he makes in the present will play out in the future. And he sees that they are right. No matter what choice he makes, he will become their Messiah. And he's going to unleash a jihad that will consume the galaxy. And when I saw that word jihad, I did a double take. And it comes up again and again.

We learned that thousands of years earlier there was something called the Butlerian Jihad where humans fought machines and after humans won, artificial intelligence was banished from the galaxy. That's why the distant future feels so ancient. And when I got to the second book in the series, which is called Dune Messiah,

it was clear that religion is the dominant theme here. Frank Herbert incorporates a lot of different religions into his fictional world, but Islam is clearly the religion he's borrowing from the most. Which made me wonder, do these books resonate differently with Muslim readers? And what can we learn about Dune from hearing their perspective? Well, I'm a geek from Pakistan originally. That's my backstory. My origin, if you will, is I'm that kid in Pakistan who just really got into science fiction and fantasy. That is Sami Shah. Today, he's a writer and comedian living in Australia. And while he really liked Dune as a kid, he didn't really understand why until he took a literature course in college. And so for me to kind of read Dune and see that Frank Herbert

was aware of Muslim mythology and of Islamic culture was a big deal. It really meant a lot to me. It just felt like the first twinkling of representation in the genre. Even the part about that spice melange rang true for him. I was thinking more about the ways in Europe, in the Middle Ages, they used to import a lot of spices from the Middle East. And they sent all these explorers out into the world and, you know, like cumin and saffron and everything was highly valued. And entire colonized nations were wiped out for just things like that. And this is Silman Syed. I'm a professor of social theory and decolonial thought at the University of Leeds.

And he says when he was growing up in the UK, there were three big sci-fi narratives in his childhood. There was Dune, there was Star Wars, and there was Star Trek. And he wasn't crazy about Star Trek. I mean, you know, it's quite true that, for example, Roddenberry didn't want to have any religion in Star Trek because he thought, well, everything, it will all finish, you know, the future would be, everyone would be rational. And the intriguing thing for me as reading Dune was simply the idea that the future is so colored by the Islamicate influence that you couldn't really find the kind of idea that Europe would simply expand and the West would simply expand. And the Federation of Planets is simply the United States in space kind of thing.

It's interesting because I always thought the Federation in Star Trek was this kind of like lovely utopian vision of the future. But, I mean, I could see why you would find it condescending that, you know, they have this like prime directive where they're supposed to study these societies and these other planets but not interfere with their development. Well, also, the prime directive is constantly being broken. That's the other problem. So the prime directive, which in a way is not a very bad analogy for American follow-up policy at the time there. So he was ambivalent about Star Trek, but he had much more negative feelings about Star Wars. So in a world of Star Wars, you are less likely to encounter or recognize a non-European past or non-European elements which are not to be

despised or delegated. And I think the thing that Dune does is, in a way, give you the idea, the possibility of actually, it might be cool to be involved in a future which is not simply a retaking of the kind of rationalist technological understanding that we have today, that you may can imagine a different kind of world order. Now, in my research about Dune, I found this blog post that categorized all the Arabic and Islamic terms in the series. And there are dozens of them. And this article was written 14 years ago, but it's so popular, it still gets reposted all the time. The author is Khaled Behalden. He grew up in Egypt,

now lives in Canada. And he wrote the blog post just as the U.S. was invading Iraq, because he wanted to put something out there that was positive about Islam. The interesting part is the comments. If you go and read the comments, then you'll find is the comments. If you go and read the comments, then you'll find all sorts of reactions. Some would try to deny that Herbert would borrow from the evil Islam or something like that. And some would try to say that, no, no, no, no, you should focus on the ecology part. No, no, no, you should focus on the self-improvement and Zen part. But it's all of that. It's basically, he incorporated all of that. Now Khaled is a big Dune fan, but he's never actually read the books.

He first discovered Dune through a 1992 video game that you played on your PC, which was all about strategizing battles between the different clashing royal families. But it was, you know, an enjoyable game. And, you know, it was mainly sci-fi. There was nothing about the backstory or the mythology. And then he saw a miniseries adaptation from the year 2000, which was pretty faithful to the books. Meet the sister of the one they call Muad'Dib. And that's when he started noticing all the Islamic and Arabic references. It just jumps at you, okay? The words like Mahdi, Muaddi, Jihad, Jabbar, Sayyidina,

even the names, the proper names of people like Aliyah, Farouk, they're all just straight Arabic. Even the name of the planet, Arrakis. The name means trotting camel. So when a camel is trotting, they say it's dancing. Now, the Fremen tribes on Arrakis are also called the Fedakin, which is similar to Fedagin, the guerrilla fighters from the Middle East. And the Fedakin believe the main character, Paul, is their ma'adi, which is Arabic for the guided one. And when they accept Paul as their leader,

they give him two names, usul, U-S-U-L, which means principles in Arabic, and the other one is Muhadib, M-A-U-D apostrophe D-I-B. Now, in this world, that is actually the name of a little mouse-like creature on Dune, but in Arab history. Muhadib means a tutor, and it used to be the rich people would have a tutor to come to their home and teach the kids. And this we're talking about 1,200 years ago, 1,000 years ago.

Although growing up in Pakistan, Sami Shah understood that term differently. In Shia Islam, which is one of the two sects of Islam, the Mahdi is the chosen one who will return. God will send him down at the end of times to kind of save humanity from the Antichrist and that kind of thing. So it's very much the messianic hero. The first time I saw that in the Dune book, I was like, is this the same character? Could that possibly be a thing? And then you realize that he's using the word jihad and he's using it almost in a more accurate way than it is currently used on CNN and MSNBC and Fox.

Although it's hard to read the books today and see jihad over and over again and not think of Al-Qaeda or ISIS. I mean, the Arabic word jihad means struggle. It doesn't mean war. It doesn't mean kill white people, it doesn't mean fly planes into buildings, it literally just translates into struggle. The way it was used throughout most of history was that sometimes, I'm not white, I'm not brownwashing, history is many times used as a justification for invading other lands, because empires build by invasion and things like that. And so, yeah, jihad was one of the words that was bandied about by the Ottoman Empire and by the preceding empires in the Middle East before that to invade India or Indian territory and Hindu territory and other territories along the way. But at the same time, for Muslims on a personal

level, jihad also meant literally things you're struggling with. So I will have a jihad against carbs. I will have a jihad against, you know, watching too much Netflix so I can get my work done. It was as innocuous as that as well. He is using the jihad in the original sense at the time of the prophet muhammad because the prophet muhammad was basically born in mecca and then he started his message there for about 13 years and then the people there started oppressing him and his followers so he had to flee and and go to another place called medina and then he started jihad which is basically fighting the oppressors so herbert

is using it in this context which is basically the harkonnen has been the oppressors. So Herbert is using it in this context, which is basically the Harkonnen has been the oppressors and the Fremen were the oppressed people. And Muad'Dib came and he led them so that they can overthrow the oppressors. And that's exactly what jihad used to be. Although the jihad in Dune is not so black and white. So again, our main character, Paul Atreides, wants to overthrow the emperor who was responsible for his father's murder. And the Fremen definitely want to help him because the emperor has oppressed them and exploited the natural resources of their planet.

But as I mentioned earlier, Paul has the foresight to see that his jihad will kill 60 billion people and wipe out 40 other religions. So he keeps trying to make choices to see that his jihad will kill 60 billion people and wipe out 40 other religions. So he keeps trying to make choices to avoid that fate. But eventually, he accepts that this can't be done. Even if he were to die, he'd be considered a martyr, and they would carry on the jihad in his name. He can only keep choosing the least bad option. But some of the other people who follow him, including his own family,

are not quite as moralistic. And Khalid says this is not out of sync with the true teachings of Islam, when the religion isn't twisted by fanatics. The other thing is Unsur Akhaka, which is a saying of the Prophet saying, Unsur Akhaka Zaliman Aw Mazluman. It's an exact verbatim saying of prophet muhammad saying that support your your brother whether he's an oppressed or an oppressor and his companions you know came and said okay we know how to support him when he's oppressed how can we support him

when he's an oppressor himself he said by stopping him from doing oppression and that's how we support him. I'm originally from Egypt and we had a revolution and the military just took over and became worse than the Mubarak regime. I mean, look at the beginning of the, even the Russian revolution. Power does that to people. Whether it's Dune or whether it's the succession

to the prophet Muhammad or whether it's whatever. It always happens. And this is how Frank Herbert himself put it in a 1983 BBC interview. Leaders amplify the mistakes. Their mistakes are amplified by the numbers who follow them without question. And charismatic leaders tend to build up followings, power structures, and those power structures tend to be taken over by people who are corruptible. I don't think that the old saw about power corrupting and absolute power

corrupting absolutely is accurate. I think power attracts the corruptible. I have to say, I found it surprising to hear these guys speak so highly of Frank Herbert since he is a white American man using Islamic and Arabic terms to tell his story. Isn't he guilty of cultural appropriation? Sami Shah doesn't think so. Cultural appropriation is a problem only because the white writer writing about Pakistani culture or Muslim culture, if you will, if an American writer who was white wrote about gins, their book would be considered, oh, my God, it's cross-cultural and exciting and this and that, whereas as a brown guy writing about gins, my book was considered, oh, people

won't get it. And so I had to go with an indie publisher because no one else would touch it. Now, Silman Syed sees this issue a little differently, since he writes about colonial narratives and fiction. I don't think it's cultural appropriation which is the problem with Frank Herbert. I think in a way what you have here is an attempt to simply read the non-European through European lens. In other words, he thinks that Frank Herbert treated Islam with respect, but Herbert also brought unconscious bias. For instance, Paul's journey of leading the nomadic tribes to freedom is a classic white man's fantasy, like Lawrence of Arabia or even James Cameron's Avatar. It is part of that kind of noble savage tradition.

They don't have the ability to understand technology. They don't have ability to understand or be innovative or cunning in any particular way. And of course, one of the familiar things in all of these is how easy it is for the Western character to become, go native. But the native can never become Western because that's, they can always be spotted. It's always never quite right. They can never do it. So, well, let's say. All right. So let's say like Frank Herbert is able to somehow travel to Dune and ingest Melange himself and have this incredible moment of enlightenment and realize that he's fallen into all these cliches of colonial narratives. How how should he then have rewritten Dune? So what I'm trying to say is that how he would have done it differently,

I think he could only do it differently if there was a possibility of being able to imagine why does Paul have to be from the House of Trades? Why couldn't someone like Stilgar be the leader? That character, Stilgar, is the head of the Fremen tribe. He's a true believer in Paul and a very loyal right-hand man. So if Dune had been the story of self-emancipation, then there would be no Paul. Stilgar himself could have become the Mohammed-type leader.

It could have been another way of telling the history, or one history of Islam, It could have been another way of telling the history or one history of Islam in which it basically transforms the world. And in the process, destroying the, you know, the half of the Roman Empire and the Persian empires as a way of reconstructing a more egalitarian society initially, which is far more cosmopolitan than anything that has gone before it at the time. But that would have been a happy ending. And Frank Herbert had no interest in happy endings. In a moment, we will look at Dune from the other side of the jihad. That's just after the break. Now, it turns out there is another podcast host here at Panoply who is obsessed with Dune.

And when he was a kid, he found the book in his local library, and he couldn't believe how much Dune resembled the world around him. But Lial Leibowitz was growing up in Tel Aviv. And then all of a sudden I read things like, oh, here's a tribe of kind of Middle Eastern sounding desert folk called the Fedayun or the Fedaykin, I think, in the book. And, you know, my granddaddy fought against the actual Fedayin. And so this made a lot of sense to me, this book. It was sort of ripped from the headlines type of stuff.

Novels have a funny way of playing with your perspective. type of stuff. Novels have a funny way of playing with your perspective. Reading Dune, he identifies with the Fremen or the Fedakin and their struggle in this fictional world, even though in the real world, he would have been on the other side of that struggle. Yes, even as an Israeli, you obviously identify with the Fremen because their religious belief, even though when sort of juxtaposed to real world religion that is very inimical to me as a person and my whole existence and the existence of my country, is deeply embodied, right? It is a real and profoundly meaningful religion. You understand why jihad is brewed and launched, and you are not in the least

inimical to it. You support it, or if you don't support it, you believe that it is real and it is meaningful and has a reason, which is the genius of this book. Which led Liao to wonder, who is Frank Herbert? How did this American writer come to imagine a world like this? Well, first of all, Frank Herbert was an environmentalist. In fact, he gave a speech at the first Earth Day in 1970. But back in the early 60s, he was a journalist. And the inspiration for Dune came from an article he wrote about the dunes in the west coast of Oregon. came from an article he wrote about the dunes in the west coast of Oregon.

He actually never finished writing that article because he got so deep into the research about dunes that it sparked his imagination. And he started imagining all these environmental problems on another planet. I think he possessed the newspaperman's obsession with detail and with really understanding the culture in which he set his novel, which absolutely shows. The thing that attracts me about Dune and the thing that was obvious to me from the first reading as a child is that it feels so real. I mean, the world, you have no problem imagining what melange is, right? You have no problem imagining, even though these are like giant sandworms from hell, you understand the reality because the reality is

finely observed. Yes, he had a very rich imagination. He also took a lot of LSD because, you know, it was the 60s. But Frank Herbert's fascination with religion went way back. Growing up, his eight maternal aunts were such devout Catholics and tried so hard to instill religion into young Frank, he eventually rebelled and became a Buddhist. And there's a lot of Christian imagery in the books too, like the B'nai Jesuit, who are kind of like this cabal of nuns that manipulate politics behind the scenes and follow something called the Orange Catholic Bible. In fact, Paul's mother, Jessica, is one of the B'nai Jesaret, and she becomes a, quote, reverend mother with supernatural mental abilities. That's why when Leal reads Dune, he feels like Frank Herbert understands the thinking

of the Middle East, where the three Abrahamic faiths began. The key point to understanding him is realizing that I think he was drawn to that region because he understood this is where the kind of religion or religious belief in which he was reared flourishes. This is the region of zero sum conflicts. This is the region of bloodshed for a reason. For a reason. Yes. Because I think the way our religious experiences are shaped and lived, I think it's true of many, although certainly not all, Islamic fundamentalists. I think it's true of some, although certainly not all,

Jewish zealots. It is a reality which allows very little breathing room, if you will, and is deeply steeped in this messianic urge to purge the earth of your enemies and inherit your kingdom. Well, what do you think of Paul? I think Paul, to me, is a fascinating character in that he

sees the future and he keeps trying to make different choices to avoid the jihad. What were your thoughts on that as a kid and now as an adult? I think that is a question I will never stop asking myself because the answer obviously is pretty much the answer to everything, right? It's the answer to life. And at the core of it is really a deeper answer, which is to what extent do you really believe in free will?

There's a really great saying in Hebrew, which goes to the Talmud, Ha'kol Tzafui Va'Rashut Netunah. Everything is foreordained, but permission is given, which really could be the motto of Paul Atreides, because what does it mean? If everything is foreordained, then why do you need permission?

Well, you need permission because your struggle, the jihad within, if you will, is precisely the struggle to try and live out the best destiny you can. The lesson here, and I think that is a lesson, that that is perhaps the great unifying universal force of Dune is that the capacity for great disaster is innate even in the best laid plans. And I think that is such a complex, complicated, engaging, horrifying notion, which really draws us again to this character and to this book. I think that is what sets Dune apart from a lot of other science fiction.

I mean, it has a lot of wonderful things to say about the power of religion, but it's also very much about what happens when you mix religion with the power of the state. Because if the zealots take over, religious power can corrode the very faith it's trying to protect and the art of statecraft. And it's hard to see the spark of humanity underneath that struggle for power. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Khalid Bahaldin,

Suleiman Syed, Sami Shah, and Leali Bowitz. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook, I tweet at emalinski, and you can support the show by clicking the donate button on my site imaginaryworldspodcast.org

and before wrapping up I want to recommend another podcast to you, 20,000 Hertz. The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. For example, and this is a good place for my listeners to start, the episode on space, where the host Dallas Taylor talks about why space would be nothing like we know from science fiction. Perhaps the best marketing tagline in

movie history came from the Ridley Scott film, Alien. In space, no one can hear you scream. That phrase is true, and not only because of the distance from Earth, it has to do with how sound travels. You can subscribe to 20,000 Hertz wherever you get your podcasts. Panoply.