So when he talks about religion, I mean, it uses the word Islam.

You know, I've had a chance to go through a lot of notes, a lot of his letters to his editors, a lot of his fan mail and almost all of the editors picked up on it. For somebody who isn't as well-versed in the languages of Arabic or Farsi or Turkish or in just the culture, broadly speaking, how obvious are these references? You don't even notice you're picking up on this stuff.

In science fiction, you sometimes go in assuming that there will be something you don't understand and you just sort of adopt it and walk through it and absorb it as you go. And Herbert himself was actually very upfront about it. Entertainment/The Associated Press)īut if you linguistically look at it, and if you look at sort of how he describes religion in this place over 20,000 years in the future, Islam is basically part and parcel of the way everything is sort of articulated without being the Islam of today. But clearly its presence and influence is everywhere.

Though Paul Atreidis is typically portrayed by white actors, his character eventually grows into a messianic figure for the Fremen - the humans who inhabit the story's eponymous desert planet Dune. The most obvious place is obviously the Fremen people themselves, who seem to be sort of inspired by Bedouin, by a lot of the indigenous peoples of northern Africa and the Middle East. Islam is pretty pervasive throughout the books, and it's something that was always noticed both by his editors as well as audiences. What are some of the examples of how Islam appears in Frank Herbert's Dune books? Karjoo-Ravary, an assistant professor of Islamic studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., spoke with Day 6 host Peter Armstrong about the connections between Dune and the Middle East, and why Herbert drew on these traditions in his writings. Wenzel)īut Ali Karjoo-Ravary says some readers might be surprised to learn that the book also contains ample references to Middle Eastern and Islamic culture. He says the references to Middle Eastern and Islamic culture in Frank Herbert's Dune are intentional and deliberate. Ali Karjoo-Ravary is an assistant professor of Islamic Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa.

Dune novel