“Dune” by Frank Herbert is the most popular and influential science fiction book series of the last fifty years. Dune books have inspired sci-fi blockbusters like Star Wars, Matrix and many others. If influence of a popular book is measured by the nature of its fanbase and the use of its theme in public discourse, then Dune reigns above all other popular books of sci-fi. In USA, many of the most influential opinion-makers are fans of Dune and use Dune themes, Dune jargons regularly in their comments and opinions. Now a new Dune movie adaptation is onscreen and those opinionmakers are all effervescent over it. So, if you want to be aware about an important part of elite discourse, you should watch the movie and read the book also to understand all the hullabaloo.
I want to talk about two of the Dune series main themes that I found to be very fascinating and relevant for our present time. I will talk about one theme in this article and leave the second for the second part of this Dune commentary. First theme is Dune’s very clear inspiration from the history and prehistory of the land of Arabian Peninsula, rise of Islam and 20th century geopolitics of oil from Arab lands. Dune is set in a desert planet named Arakis, the planet which is the only source of a substance called spice that is indispensable for interstellar travel. The galactic empire has established a corporate company with monopoly rights to mine and sell spice from Arakis. The imperial family and all the elite families of the empire hold shares in this monopoly company and that have made them fabulously rich and powerful. The indigenous people of the deserts of Arakis are called Fremen, a tough people who eke out a life from the forbidding deserts through ingenious technology and grit.
One of the main themes of the first book in Dune series is how the empire and corporate monopoly brutally repress the indigenous Fremen in pursuit of extracting spice from deserts all over Arakis. The Fremen are marginalized in population centers and violently crushed whenever they try to protest environment-destroying spice extraction by the company. In response to hundreds of years of repression by the empire, the Fremen have developed a messianic religion that gives them hope that one day an outsider with extraordinary abilities will come to Arakis and lead the Fremen to freedom from the brutal grip of the empire.
The turning point in the first book came when the hero’s family, an elite family from another planet, realized that there are many millions of Fremens living in Dune, unnoticed and uncared by the empire. When the hero’s family was treacherously sabotaged and massacred by the emperor, the hero fled to the Fremen in desert for shelter. Gradually, with the help of his special inherited abilities born out of hundred years of selective breeding, the hero convinces the Fremen that he is the prophesied messiah. He then uses the army of Fremen to overthrow the empire in a surprise revolution and become emperor himself.
Dune’s inspiration from history of early Islam and 20th century oil-politics of Middle East are unmistakable. However, another parallel of Fremen civilization with pre-Islamic Arabia has only become salient in the recent decades. Just as there was a complex, technologically sophisticated Fremen civilization with millions of inhabitants in Arakis completely unnoticed by the empire, archeological research and studies of ancient literature have found that, rather than a desolate, uncivilized wilderness, pre-Islamic Arabia was a land thriving with sophisticated civilizations and kingdoms consisting of large number of people who were commercially, culturally and religiously well connected with the world of antiquity.
Far from being a land full of idolatry and pagan-polytheism, pre-Islamic Arabia was greatly populated by Judaic, Christian and many other strands of monotheism. In fact, archeologists have found very little evidence of idol worshipping but lots of evidence of worship of a supreme deity. Moreover, women were quite powerful in those societies as many stories and records of queens, leaders, prophetess, healers are being uncovered. The most interesting finds in recent years have come from discovery of thousands of epigraphs, writing on rocks that go back many hundreds of years before Islam, throughout the Peninsula. These inscriptions depict prayers, memorials, declarations of achievements, chiseled on rocks by common people. Ubiquity of inscriptions suggest that in pre-Islamic Arabia, literacy and understanding of written words were widespread. Proto Arabic inscriptions have been found in as far away as in ancient Carthage, 500 BC, suggesting widespread connectivity of the people.
For religious reasons, Islamic literature and history writings in early periods emphasized barbaric, illiterate, pristine nature of pre-Islamic Arabia to show how miraculous the moral revolution of Islam and the defeats of Persian and Byzantine empire at the hands of Muslim armies were. And of course, after the capital and urban centers of the new Muslim empires shifted to Damascus and Baghdad, the Arabian Peninsula became a backwater of empires only seasonally visited for pilgrimage. Arabia remained in such a neglected state until oil was discovered in early 20th century and the area became a center of global attention and machination.
In recent years the Saudi government has officially started to encourage and support archeological and academic study of pre-Islamic Arabia. Saudi Arabians have developed a new pride in accomplishments of their people not just after the revolutionary dawn of Islam but in millions of people who inhabited the land hundreds and thousands of years before.
