The Faults in Our Paul: The Colonial Subversions and Limitations of Dune
“My dune,” Baron Vladimir Harkonnen calls the planet Arrakis in Dune (2021). (Flickr)
by Michael Skora (SFS ‘23)
On October 26, Legendary Entertainment confirmed that the science-fiction epic Dune (2021), which grossed almost $225 million in its opening weekend, would get a part two in 2023. Dune’s (2021) recent success may come as a surprise given the source material’s notoriously dense worldbuilding and the cancelled and lackluster attempts at previous film adaptations. Denis Villenueve — the director of Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and a childhood fan of the original Dune book series by Frank Herbert — finally released an adaptation with critical and commercial success alike.
Still, a common criticism of Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) is that it centers white, often colonialist perspectives. Evaluating these critiques requires familiarity with the controversies of Herbert’s book and the 2021 film. Western media depictions of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) cultures and peoples and Islam, as well as the worldly research Herbert underwent to write Dune, also contextualize the complex and messy relevance of this bold franchise. Unfortunately, Villeneuve’s vision of the 1965 novel smudges its nuances while reinforcing its orientalist flaws. For all its admirable ambitions, Dune should not be considered the pinnacle of its kind of science fiction.
So, What Is Dune?
The original novel Dune, which launched a 21-book series and was heralded by The Chicago Tribune as “one of the monuments of modern science fiction,” takes place in the Imperium, a universe-wide human civilization over twenty thousand years into the future. The science fiction series embraces unique genre-bending, most notably the absence of robots and alien lifeforms. Herbert removed these near-ubiquitous staples of space-faring fiction so that he could almost entirely focus on the institutions, beliefs, and ecology of human societies.
The Dune franchise revolves around the spice, a gene-augmenting substance that only exists on Arrakis, or Dune, a desert planet inhabited by giant, hostile sandworms called Shai-Hulud. Because “thinking machines” are forbidden within the Imperium that rules over the known universe, all interplanetary travel relies on spice-enhanced human supercomputers. Thus, whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice, and therefore the entire Imperium.
1965 cover art of a Shai-Hulud (sandworm) in The Prophet of Dune, the second half of Dune, during its original serialization in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. (Flickr)
When the Imperium’s emperor incites the House Harkonnen to eliminate their rival, House Atreides, the new ruler of Arrakis, the Duke Atreides’ son Dune’s protagonist Paul Atreides flees the Harkonnens and adopts the lifestyle of Arrakis’s indigenous Fremen. Conspiring behind these feudal rivalries are the Bene Gesserit, an exclusively female order with spice-granted powers. The Bene Gesserit secretly manipulate and cross-breed the Imperium’s most powerful houses in anticipation of a male savior called the Kwisatz Haderach destined to bring about universal stability and prosperity. The order designed Paul Atreides as a step toward this goal. Because the Bene Gesserit also implanted a messenaic myths among indigenous cultures across planets, the Fremen accept the exiled Paul as their prophetic leader, the Mahdi. Now dubbed “Muad’dib,” Paul leads the Fremen in a jihad against the Imperium, Houses, and Bene Gesserit alike.
Orientalism in the Occident
Many critics of Dune attack its orientalist storytelling. Imperial-era orientalist studies in European countries justified imperialist intervention and conquest by infantilizing foreign cultures as “savages,” in need of adopting Western civilization. Today, the academic term orientalism critiques this old orientalism, how “the West” essentialized — and still essentializes — “the East” as romantic, stagnant, and irrational. Orientalism is extremely visible within American cinema: the fetishized belly dancer and the opulent sultan were stock characters since Hollywood’s inception. After the 9/11 attacks and subsequent the War on Terror, Hollywood particularly fixated on the racist caracature of the “fanatic terrorist” as its predominant representation of Islam.
Meanwhile, in more sympathetic portrayals of SWANA peoples, the “white savior narrative” prevails in stories of anticolonial resistance. The most prominent example is the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia about British military officer T. E. Lawrence, who participated in the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule. The story makes Arab peoples peripheral to the adventure of a singular mythological white man. Lawrence’s own account of the conflict, Seven Pillars of Wisdom,essentialized his Arab compatriots as the “bravest, simplest, and merriest of men” who needed his strong, disciplined leadership to achieve independence. The film exacerbated anti-Arab racism by falsely depicting the Arab troops as unruly and inept until Lawrence instilled military discipline into them. Ironically, Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Lawrence of Arabia somewhat also subverted the white savior narrative: When British and French officials cut up former Ottoman territory into colonial mandates, Lawrence acknowledged that his championing of Arab independence was shamefully naive. Lawrence did not save the Arabs; he helmed the arrival of their next oppressors. The debate over whose narratives anticolonial storylines center hold special relevance within criticisms of Frank Herbert’s Dune and Villeneuve’s adaptation.
A 1962 poster of the film Lawrence of Arabia. (Flickr).
The Inspirations and Purpose of Dune
To write Dune, Herbert read more than 200 books over six years of research. He draws from early Christianity, Ancient Greece, the Nahuatl people and language, the San people and the Quileute people, who resided only a few miles away from his Oregon home. But the Dune universe undoubtedly owes the most to its Islamic and SWANA inspirations that Herbert peppered throughout Dune’s mythos. Arrakis not only appears as an alteration of “Iraq,” but also derives from the Arabic word for “dancer.” Shai-Hulud combines the Arabic words for “thing” (Shai) and “eternal” or “eternity” (Hulud), and Muad’Dib was a title for “teacher” during the reigns of Caliphs. In Islamic and especially Shi’ite eschatology (the branch of theology concerning death, destiny, and the idea of “judgment day”), the Mahdi is the messianic figure who will deliver justice and purge evil during the end times. Yet some influences come across as superficial: the Fremen cry of grief (“la, la, la”) is literally Arabic for “no, no, no.” Many other Arabic and Islamic terms are applied incorrectly.
On the other hand, the sheer depth of Herbert’s references suggests that his comprehension of Islamic and Arabic language and history was actually quite profound. For example, the Fremen maxim prayer maxim “bil-la-kaifa” comes from an Islamic term meaning “without a how.” It only appears in arcane Islamic theological discussions, meaning that Herbert’s discovery of this term alone disproves claims that Dune is culturally shallow. Further, though Herbert does somewhat code the Fremen and the Imperium’s Houses as opposites, he does not reduce them to orientalist and allegorical binaries of white/black and Western/Eastern. Instead, nearly all the factions within Dune syncretize real-life cultures, and the beliefs and practices of both the Imperium and the Fremen have Islamic influences. For example, in the context of Dune, jihad does not have any specific moral connotation. Rather, jihad acts as a tactical and spiritual mechanism of resistance directed against oppressive systems that is also open to potential misuse. Jihad is an essential philosophic tenet throughout the Dune; it earns a far more respectable interpretation than what Western media usually promotes.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom was among the various books in Frank Herbert’s personal library along with Jordanian author Suleiman Mousa’s T.E. Lawrence: An Arab View, which argued that Lawrence grossly understated the Arabs’ roles in the revolt to inflate his own role. Dune began serialization only a year after the release of The Lawrence of Arabia, so many readers noted the resemblance of Paul Atreides and the Fremen in Dune to T. E. Lawrence and the Arab soldiers, respectively. Like Lawrence does, Herbert reduces the agency of the Fremen through their susceptibility to colonial manipulation by the Bene Gesserit and Paul Atreides; however, Herbert also flips the white savior trope on its head.
The first Dune book follows and completes the basic patterns of a traditional hero’s journey: Paul flees the Harkonnen but later regains control of Arrakis, the spice, and the Imperium on the backs of a Fremen jihad. Although Paul encounters dreadful premonitions of the atrocities his jihad will unleash throughout Dune, its sequel, Dune Messiah, completely inverts its predecessor’s white savior narrative beats. In Dune Messiah, Paul is now emperor, but at a terrible cost: Atreides and Fremen troops have exterminated billions of lives across the galaxy during years of conquest. Lawrence may have incidentally betrayed the Arab peoples, but Paul condemns dozens of worlds to genocide and sterilization. Dune Messiah’s deconstruction of the hero’s journey so disgusted John Campbell, the editor who serialized the original book, that he rejected publication.
Frank Herbert had very clear intentions when he crafted such a total deviation from common adventure story plotlines. Herbert despised how unquestioned charismatic leadership exploited the interests and social movements of the masses. In a 1969 interview, Herbert even called out British imperialism and T.E. Lawrence for exploiting “the avatar power” of the Arab Revolt meant for actual liberation. A contrarian who considered John F. Kennedy the most dangerous president because people trusted him unconditionally, Herbert intentionally endowed Dune with the message that “Messiahs should come with a label on their forehead: ‘May be dangerous to your health.’”
Frank Herbert with his wife Beverly in 1976. (Flickr)
Do the Critiques of Dune Hold Up?
Dune as a series demystifies the individualistic white savior narrative in favor of an analysis of how political power corrupts. Indeed, it’s a compelling antithesis to the white savior narrative. But while Herbert condemns the “Messianic impulse,” he still chooses Paul, the outsider, as the locus point of his anticolonial narrative. What if Dune centered the Fremen and how they resisted Bene Gesserit and Paul’s appropriation of their resistance? This is not an implausible dilemma: Herbert himself related to the Fremen leader Stilgar the most out of Dune’s characters, and, when an interviewer called the Fremen as “primitive,” he corrected him. In Herbert’s words, the Fremen were “quite sophisticated.”
Although Dune demonstrates great sophistication in certain areas, it still reiterates orientalist tropes and tendencies. Herbert romanticized the Fremen by characterizing them as a “noble savages,” carved from Arrakis’s heat, sandstorms, and sandworms. Perhaps Herbert’s worst failing was that he rarely ever acknowledged his influences from the various religions, languages, and cultures syncretized into his work.
How does the movie handle these issues? To be sure, accusations of white saviorism hold about as little water toward Dune (2021) as they do toward the book: Paul’s visions of atrocities he later commits are sprinkled throughout the movie’s second half, appropriately complicating the trope. Nevertheless, like its source material, Dune (2021) inevitably centers the perspective of a colonizer within an anticolonial story. By far, the most outrageous error Dune (2021) commits was its near total absence of Muslim and SWANA cast and crew. This erasure actually makes the film’s cultural appropriation far more egregious than that of its source material. When the filmakers shot in the deserts of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, when non-Muslim and non-SWANA actors spoke Arabic and dressed in Islamic-inspired clothing, Villenueve replaces people with aesthetics. Film journalists rarely interviewed Villeneuve on the paucity of Muslim and SWANA representation in Dune (2021), and, when they did, he skirted around the question.
Dune (2021) also replaced some of Herbert’s multifaceted cultural inspirations with caracturized orientalist binaries. The Fremen chant in repetitive pseudo-Arabic monotones of “Arrakis,” “Bene Gesserit,” and “Shai-Hulud” rather than the more subtle and specialized theological phrases used in the original book. Muslim scholars further accused the filmmakers of separating Dune’s worldbuilding from its origins when they replaced mentions of “jihad” with “crusade.” While concerns that U.S. audiences could misinterpret “jihad” are expected, Dune could have been a powerful opportunity for Hollywood to offer viewers a more nuanced depiction of jihad that what Western media usually propagates. The filmmakers of Dune (2021) either did not have the courage or the creative freedom to challenge the already atrocious dearth of Muslim and SWANA representation in Hollywood.
Challenging Orientalism in Dune and Beyond
Dune (2021) disappointed many Muslims and SWANA audience members who wished to see themselves on and behind the camera. Many continue to call for full involvement in any future Dune developments and projects. Given the very recent approval for Dune: Part II, Villeneuve and his team have a second chance to correct their mistakes. Muslim and SWANA creative direction over future Dune adaptations could better appreciate Herbert’s influences and directly challenge the orientalism and appropriation endemic to his book series.
Then again, a half-century old novel by a white man should not be recognized as the paragon for Islamic and SWANA-inspired science fiction. Far more important than another Dune movie or TV-series is science fiction created by Muslims and SWANA authors that incorporate themes and storytelling elements from their own religious and cultural personal experiences, such as Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl Who Fell to Earth: A Memoir, Haris Durrani’s Technologies of the Self, and G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. While structural change within Hollywood’s employment strategies is unlikely, stories told by Muslim and SWANA authors demonstrate that science fiction is not the domain of white authors.
Herbert stood out among 20th century science-fiction authors by decentralizing Western-based storytelling. To his credit, he embraced the complexities of real-life religions, politics, cultures, and environments while most of his contemporaries imagined only sterile technocratic and secularized worlds in comparison. Dune catalyzed conversations about what speculative storytelling could be — but, as its shortfalls betray, not necessarily what it should be. Centuries-old racist tropes should not dictate the kinds of stories people read and revere. Perhaps once science fiction’s culturally emancipatory possibilities are realized, the silver screen will likewise reflect not just the world’s cultural breadth and depth, but the best imaginations of its peoples.
For More Information About Muslim Perspectives on Dune (the book and the movie), check out the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative’s recorded two-part series, “Dune and Muslim World Building: Significance of Social Commentary of Race, Imperialism, and Faith in Contemporary Science Fiction.”
Part I - Dune and the Evolution of Muslim Scifi and Fantasy Epics – October 22nd
Part II - Dune Review- What we saw and what we liked – October 29th
Also, for more articles on Dune’s cultural inspirations see Haris Durrani on Medium, and for a comprehensive list of Arabic and Islamic-originating words in Dune, check out this page.