(Image source: Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures)

When Dune: Part Two came out this spring I felt called to the theater like a sandworm drawn by a thumper (IYKYK). As a science fiction fan, I wanted to see the latest blockbuster adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 novel. I cannot think of another science fiction franchise that so clearly draws on Arabic terminology, Islamic theology, and stereotypically “Middle Eastern” culture. The decades since Herbert published the first book in the Dune series include U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and concerns over reliance on spice—oh wait, I mean oil—continue to drive U.S. domestic and foreign policy. The issues Herbert raised in Dune such as religion, politics (especially the dangers of charismatic leaders), and colonialism—as well as ecology and climate change, issues largely ignored by the recent films—continue to hold great importance today.

As a scholar of Islam who also teaches college courses on science fiction, race, and cultural appropriation, I had concerns about the depiction of Muslims in Dune: Part One (2021). Instead of alleviating those concerns, watching Dune: Part Two brought them into sharper focus, especially since these two films have combined for over $1 billion in revenue worldwide. Countless people are consuming Dune, and I have significant concerns about what exactly they are consuming in terms of messages about the Fremen who serve as stand-ins for Arabs and Muslims.

In Dune’s version of humanity’s far future, the desert world of Arrakis is the source of spice, the most valuable substance in the galaxy because space navigators use it to transport ships from one system to another. The galaxy is controlled by an emperor who pits different noble Houses against each other. Arrakis’s indigenous people, the Fremen, have been persecuted for generations by House Harkonnen who occupied the planet with an imperial mandate to mine spice. Envious of House Atreides’ growing power, the emperor commands them to take over spice mining on Arrakis while conspiring with House Harkonnen to slaughter House Atreides in a sneak attack. The ruler of House Atreides, Duke Leto Atreides, wants a more equitable arrangement with the Fremen as part of his plan to harness “desert power.” His teenage son, Paul, arrives having strange dreams and instinctively knows how to wear a stilsuit (Fremen technology that captures the body’s moisture, allowing the wearer to drink it later to survive the desert). His mother Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, a powerful monastic order of women who have worked for millennia to manipulate the breeding lines of the royal houses so as to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, a male Bene Gesserit with extraordinary powers.

In the opening scene of Dune: Part One, the audience sees Paul studying up on Arrakis. He learns that the Fremen “are fierce and unreliable.” Yet when Paul arrives it is clear that the Fremen see something special in him. Crowds of people dressed in what I can only describe as Hollywood’s Orientalist imagination of Arabs, clamor that Paul is the “Lisan al-Gaib.” Jessica tells Paul that “Lisan al-Gaib” is a Fremen phrase meaning “Voice of the Outer World” (the actual Arabic phrase translates more exactly to “voice of the unseen”), and says that “these people have waited centuries for the ‘Lisan al-Gaib.’ They see you, they see the signs.” Paul is unconvinced, responding: “They see what they’ve been told to see.” This is a reference to the Bene Gesserit preparing the way for the Kwisatz Haderach. Their missionaries planted myths and prophecies over the millennia so that when the Kwisatz Haderach comes along, everyone recognizes him as such. It’s one way in which Herbert depicts religion in the books as a dangerous tool to manipulate the masses.

(Image source: Warner Brothers)

Paul and Jessica survive the Harkonnen sneak attack and flee to the desert. They seek refuge amongst the Fremen, and are accepted by the Fremen leader Stilgar, who believes that this boy is indeed the “mahdi” (Arabic for “the guided one,” a term drawn from Islamic theology referencing a prophesied messianic leader). Paul then meets Chani, who is literally the girl of his dreams, and defeats Fremen warrior Jamis in an honor duel, killing Jamis even though he himself had never previously killed before. This scene is key to Paul’s transformation from sheltered child to messianic warrior. The scene also conveys the Fremen sense of justice, that violence is a way of solving problems.

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The Dune-iverse has many tendrils. After the initial novel’s success, Herbert published five more books to carry the story forward. Brian Herbert (son of Frank) and Kevin J. Anderson co-authored sequels and prequels. David Lynch directed the first film adaptation in 1984, the SyFy Channel produced a TV mini-series in 2000, and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) took the franchise to its most popular and profitable heights since its inception almost sixty years ago. Thus far only the SyFy Channel’s 2003 Children of Dune carries the story beyond the first novel, although reports indicate that Villeneuve is set to direct a third film that would cover the material in Herbert’s second novel, Dune Messiah. A prequel series, Dune: Prophecy, is due to stream on HBO Max this fall.

I first thought the adaptations would become less Orientalist over time, but have found the opposite is true. Orientalism, a term popularized in 1978 by Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, describes the West’s construction of the “East” as anti-modern, irrational, static, and effeminate (amongst other things). This is in contrast to the “West” as modern, hyper-rational, dynamic, and masculine. I watched David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation with a friend who observed, “I’m really not getting any kind of ‘Arab vibe’ from these Fremen.” Well, yes, they weren’t very Arab at all! The 2000 SyFy channel’s adaptation is more Orientalist than David Lynch’s version, but less so than the Villeneuve films. What accounts for this inverted arc?

My theory is that in the 1950s and through 1965 when Herbert was researching and writing Dune, Muslims were largely absent from the consciousness of mainstream America. This meant that he could use Islam and Muslim communities as a reference for the epic mythology he was crafting because it wouldn’t be familiar to his audience. The distance — the weirdness, the exoticness — is a key factor in what made Dune appealing.

Dune: Part Two is where the action really gets going, with both sandworms and Orientalism hitting home. Paul learns the ways of the desert, including not only how to walk without attracting the mammoth sandworms but also eventually how to ride one. He takes the name “Muad’Dib,” inspired by the Arrakis desert mouse. We are told the term means “teacher of the desert,” but of course this is another Arabic term that can be translated straightforwardly as “teacher.” The Fremen leader Stilgar encourages Paul to embrace his messianic destiny even though Paul himself does not want to. “The Mahdi is too humble to say he is Mahdi,” Stilgar tells a group of brown-faced turbaned men with large bushy beards, all of them smiling widely and nodding their heads in response, the perfect Orientalist image of the irrational “Arab” fanatic. Stilgar gapes at everything Paul does then gasps “as it is written,” or “Lisan al-Gaib” or “the Mahdi.” The audience laughs, because decades of this Islamophobic and Orientalist trope within Euro-American literature and cinema tell us to laugh (and because the audience’s other option is to be fearful of the Fremen/Arabs). This became a popular meme that circulated after the film’s release, in which people make fun of Stilgar for believing in Paul. Listening to the audience in the theater laughing at Stilgar was the moment when my concerns about Dune: Part Two really came into focus.

Paul reluctantly embraces his destiny and leads the Fremen to victory over their oppressors. The Fremen leave Arrakis to take their jihad/holy war to the rest of the known galaxy under Muad’Dib’s rule. In the book we see a combination of terms: jihad, holy war, and crusade. The Villeneuve films use “holy war” and drop any reference to jihad or crusade, in part because the writers felt that, in the time that has passed since the book came out, Arab communities have become much less exotic to an American audience. This shift is also a half-hearted attempt at sidestepping the link between the Fremen and Muslims.

Herbert’s use of Arabic terminology is a key part of the Dune series, providing an exotic layer that keeps most of the audience believing this story is set in a different world. When I watched the SyFy channel’s Dune mini-series from 2000 with a friend with a similar passion for science fiction and fantasy, I pointed out every time we heard something in Dune that was in Arabic. He was shocked, having thought that Herbert created this language, just as Tolkien did with Elvish. The comparison between Tolkien and Herbert is productive since Elvish is based on Latin, Finnish, and Celtic languages, and the Fremen Chakobsa is based on Arabic but also Serbo-Croat, Turkish, and Navajo. Fans today might expect conlags (“constructed languages”) as part and parcel of high-level world building, but that was not the expectation in 1965 (nor in 1914, when Tolkien wrote the first piece of Middle-Earth related fiction). There is an additional challenge when novels are adapted for the screen, with studios hiring linguists to take what has so far only existed in written form and convert these words into something that actors can speak.

A recurring question for me has been why I find Herbert’s appropriation of Arabic problematic, while Tolkien’s use of Latin less so. The core answer is in the debate over cultural appropriation, when a person from Culture A takes something—language, practice, clothing—from Culture B, and then uses it in ways that are different from the original setting. An example would be white people at Coachella wearing both Indian and Native American clothing.

In the 2000 SyFy channel’s adaptation, the aftermath of Paul’s duel with Jamis cemented for me that the Fremen are meant to be depicted as mindless quasi-Muslim zealots. At Jamis’s funeral, Chani and other Fremen stand together and chant “bi-la kaifa” each time someone offers up a memory of their fallen comrade. In Arabic, this term literally means “without how” or “there is no ‘how’,” and is drawn from early theological disputes between the Mu’tazili and ‘Ashari schools of Islam on how to understand passages of the Qur’an. If the text says that God has a hand, or sits on a throne, is that literal or metaphorical? While the rationalist Mu’tazili argue for a combination of literal and metaphorical understandings, the ‘Ashari’s would respond, “there is no how,” meaning that the question was unnecessary. Is this how Herbert uses the term? No. Instead, the Fremen use this phrase to mean “Amen [literally: ‘nothing further need be explained’].” Muslims (even the majority of whom do not speak Arabic) utter “Amin” in the exact way that Christians and Jews say “Amen” at the conclusion of prayers, so what accounts for this unnecessary adaptation? Why not simply use the term “amen”? Because Herbert wants the Fremen to appear different than white Christians. With their blank faces and use of Arabic, Herbert depicts the Fremen as uncivilized religious savages.

Charles W. Mills argues that we can take Tolkien’s racial hierarchy (with the Elves on top, Men in the middle, and Orcs at the bottom) and map that onto a racial hierarchy in our own world, with the elves as the ultimate white race, and the orcs as a stand in for all Black and Brown peoples. We can debate whether or not to call Tolkien’s depiction racist, but for my purposes, the contrast here is that Tolkien mines cultures (specifically pre-Christian pagan Western Europe) that he considers his own to create Elvish languages, while Herbert takes languages from cultures that are definitively not his own. Therein lies the difference.

One point I will concede is that Dune: Part Two depicts the Fremen debating whether an outsider like Paul should be allowed to lead them. The Northern Fremen do not see themselves as fanatic believers in prophecy, while the Southerners – embodied in Stilgar – embrace the prophecy of Lisan al-Gaib. “We believe in Fremen” declares a Northerner. The others respond with bi-la kaifa.

Does a leader—especially a messianic one—need to be an insider? Can someone like Paul ever truly learn to become Fremen? Can we as the audience in 2024 see Paul as anything other than a white savior who has come to lead the superstitious indigenous people to their freedom? In the SyFy channel’s 2000 adaptation of Dune, Paul comments to Jessica that the Fremen “have a simple religion.” She responds: “Nothing about religion is simple.” As with religion, so too with cultural appropriation, especially in the Dune-iverse.

Dune is not alone amongst science fiction franchises engaging in cultural appropriation. George Lucas used elements from Buddhism, Daoism, and Sufism to create the Force and the Jedi. It’s not the fact that Herbert borrows so much material from Arabic and Islamic sources, but it’s the way in which he goes about the borrowing that I find problematic. Perhaps I can understand Herbert’s work as a product of his time, but I don’t see how to excuse Villeneuve for perpetuating these stereotypes sixty years later.

Why does all this matter? A common theme with American science fiction is depicting alien races and new planets as objects that “we” (the implied Euro-American subjects of the story) need to conquer or at least civilize (see most of Star Trek). This narrative has consequences in our real world, not just with European colonization over the centuries, but also here in what eventually became the United States with the genocide and near erasure of indigenous peoples. Paul’s reluctant manipulation of the Fremen fits perfectly with this narrative. To wield “desert power,” one must first take control of the desert people.

Books, TV, film, music: these are all powerful forms of cultural production that serve either to perpetuate or challenge dominant narratives we use to structure our society, develop public policy, and in general, make sense of the world. Fidelity to the source is a constant question with adaptations. Dune could be done without playing Stilgar’s devotion (and by extension, Fremen culture) for laughs, raising the question: why not depict it differently? That Villeneuve made the choices he did—and is being rewarded with huge commercial success—reveals Hollywood has a long way to go to undo its Orientalist legacy.

Patrick J. D’Silva is Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Denver. He is co-author (with Carl Ernst) of Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan (Suluk Press, 2024), and his next book focuses on the intersection of religion and science fiction. His website is www.patrickjdsilva.com.