Cinema

Dune Borrowed the Arabs’ Desert, Faith and Jihad. Then Hollywood Wrote the Arabs Out

Frank Herbert built Dune's Fremen from Bedouin life, Islam and T. E. Lawrence's Arabs. Denis Villeneuve shot Arrakis in Wadi Rum, where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed, yet cast no Arab actors.

Husam Sam Asi 3 October 2021

Zendaya as the Fremen warrior Chani in the desert in Dune (2021) — Zendaya as Chani in Dune (2021). Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures.

Ever since the American writer Frank Herbert published Dune in 1965, Hollywood has coveted it. Critics hailed the novel, and it went on to become the best-selling science-fiction novel in the world. Filming it proved a nightmare. Giants such as David Lean and Ridley Scott steered clear of it or walked away, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempt collapsed after millions of dollars had been poured into pre-production.

The first finished version came from David Lynch in 1984. It flopped with the critics and at the box office, and Lynch blamed its producers and Universal, the studio that released it, for meddling in his creative decisions. That is why expectations ran so high for the Canadian director Denis Villeneuve‘s version, which Warner Bros. is now rolling out in cinemas around the world.

Dune takes place in the distant future, in an empire of planets ruled by noble houses under the Emperor Shaddam IV of House Corrino. Its most important planet is Arrakis, the only source of the most valuable substance in the universe, melange, or the spice, which gives those who consume it extraordinary mental powers and makes travel between the planets possible. Arrakis is barely habitable, a merciless desert of scorching heat, run by House Harkonnen, who oppress its native people, the Fremen, and rule them with an iron fist. When the emperor hands Arrakis to House Atreides, the Harkonnens attack and crush them. The Atreides heir, Paul, and his mother, both gifted with extraordinary powers, escape to the Fremen. Dazzled by his powers, the Fremen take him for the Mahdi, the awaited saviour who will lead their struggle for freedom.

Why did Hollywood erase Arabs and Muslims from Dune? Husam Sam Asi’s report for BBC Arabic (in Arabic).

The Fremen are Arabs

Herbert first wanted to warn about humanity’s destruction of the environment and the drying of the earth, after watching sand dunes swallow land on the Oregon coast while reporting on them in 1957. Reading hundreds of books for his research, he added other layers: colonialism, political corruption and the use of religion to control people. He built a future world in space that mirrors the Cold War struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union on Earth: white superpowers fighting over the lands of people of colour, colonising them, oppressing their peoples and destroying their environment out of greed for their natural resources.

Herbert borrowed the Fremen from Arab and Islamic civilisation. They live a Bedouin life adapted to the harsh desert of Arrakis, follow the Zensunni faith, a blend of Japanese Zen and Sunni Islam, and believe that a holy man will appear to lead them in jihad against their colonisers, the Harkonnens. The Harkonnens, led by Baron Vladimir, stand in for communist Russia. Herbert drew the plot from the long resistance of the Muslims of the Caucasus to Russian conquest.

House Atreides is the benevolent liberal Western coloniser, the Americans. Its interest in Arrakis is the spice, and it has no wish to oppress the planet’s people. Its heir, Paul, even leads the Fremen in a holy war to free them from the Harkonnens. That recalls the Vietnam War, waged by the United States in the 1960s in the name of freeing the Vietnamese from Soviet communism, and the Iraq war at the start of this century, fought in the name of bringing Iraqis freedom and democracy. Both wars ended in devastation. By some estimates they killed around three million Vietnamese and as many as a million Iraqis.

Lawrence’s obedient servants

The white saviour who rescues oppressed people of colour is a staple of Western literature and cinema. Herbert seems to have been influenced by the British officer T. E. Lawrence, whose fame swept the world three years before Dune was published, when Lawrence of Arabia opened in 1962. The film won seven Oscars, including best picture, and is still counted among the greatest and most influential films ever made.

Lawrence sets off for the Middle East in 1916, adopts the Bedouin life and becomes one of them, then trains the Arabs to fight and leads them in fierce battles against the Turks, to free their lands and win them an independent, united Arab state. The film presents him as the hero who brought the Arabs freedom. In reality he was a British army officer who used the Arabs to defeat the Turks and opened the way for European colonialism in the Middle East.

In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the memoir he first printed privately in 1926, Lawrence describes the Arabs as “a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation”. And he goes further: “Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord; for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants.”

Herbert gave the Fremen the same traits. He portrays them as devout people bound by their traditions and creeds, who believe in irrational myths and obey without question. Paul exploits their innocence and their faith that he is the Mahdi. He becomes their leader, trains them to fight, leads their jihad against the Harkonnens and takes power for himself.

Yet did the Germans of the 1930s not submit to an Austrian named Adolf Hitler, believe his extremist ideas and follow him into a war that destroyed their country? Did Americans not believe George W. Bush’s lie about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and back his war? Any people gripped by despair and fear behaves this way, whatever its culture, and leaders exploit that fear to tighten their hold.

Like the Arabs at the start of the 20th century, the Germans after the First World War lived under the grip of the Allies, in a wretched economy. When Hitler appeared and promised them a dazzling future, they hailed him as their saviour and made him their dictator. Americans at the start of this century were in a state of panic after the attacks of 11 September, so they believed that the Bush administration was protecting them from an imminent chemical attack.

The Palestinian-American thinker Edward Said, a founding figure of postcolonial studies, dissected this in his celebrated Orientalism. Westerners, he concluded, cast the Oriental as irrational, emotional, weak and effeminate, and the Westerner as rational, strong, effective and masculine, because the West needed an unbridgeable gap between East and West. The modern Orientalist saw himself as a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation and strangeness he had himself defined. The West reduced the Arab and Islamic world to caricatures, boiled down to crude oil, and so made it easy prey for military aggression.

Hollywood erases the Arabs

Herbert blames the white man for destroying the environment and sympathises with the Fremen, from an Orientalist point of view. Hollywood went further and removed the Arabs from Dune altogether. In Lynch’s 1984 version the Fremen lose their Arab features. All of them are white, look and behave no differently from the people of the other planets, and are played by white actors. The Sufi and jihadist character of their revolt against the Harkonnens vanishes, and Paul is never called the Mahdi. He is simply Muad’Dib.

That was not why the film failed. Western audiences of the time were used to science-fiction futures populated by white characters. Lynch’s film failed because of its shoddy production, its confusing story, its weak performances and its silly visual effects.

When Villeneuve took charge of the new version and co-wrote its screenplay, hopes rose that the novel’s Arab and Islamic presence would return. He knows the Arab world. He made the Oscar-nominated Incendies, in which Canadian twins of Arab origin travel to their late mother’s homeland in the Middle East to find a brother they never knew existed and a father they believed dead, and uncover terrible truths about her life during the civil war there.

Husam Asi with director Denis Villeneuve — Husam Asi with Denis Villeneuve.

Villeneuve’s version is undoubtedly better than Lynch’s. His Fremen carry Arab features and Sufi beliefs, and they take up holy war against the colonisers under their Mahdi, Paul. Not one of them is played by an Arab actor, and the jihad of the novel has become a “crusade” and a “holy war”. Villeneuve shot Arrakis in Jordan’s Wadi Rum, the desert where David Lean filmed Lawrence of Arabia. Hollywood took the Arabs’ desert once again, and left the Arabs behind.

Herbert wanted Dune to overturn the idea of a white future for humanity. He imagined a future made from a mix of all of today’s civilisations, religions and peoples. Hollywood had the chance to use the novel to correct its stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims. It wiped them from humanity’s future instead. And whoever has no place in the future does not matter in the present.

Sources: T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Standard Ebooks); The New Arab.

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