In Dune, Paul Atreides led a jihad, not a crusade | Hacker News Reader

In Dune, Paul Atreides led a jihad, not a crusade

aljazeera.com

7 pointsivanvas7 comments

>When a director or writer casts people of colour out of the future, when a director casts Islam out of the future, they reveal their own expectations and anxieties.

Dune is 20k years in the future when Earth doesn't really function anymore. I think it's pretty reasonable that our current views on religion and race will be long, long gone by then.

We know that they are not gone in Dune. Many remain, even though combined in ways we don't expect.

For example, the Orange Catholic Bible is an important religious text which is a syncretization of several religions with clear roots on Earth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#Zen_and_relig...

> Orange Catholic Bible: the "Accumulated Book," the religious text produced by the Commission of Ecumenical Translators. It contains elements of most ancient religions, including the Maometh Saari, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism and Buddislamic traditions. Its supreme commandment is considered to be: "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul."[110]

The Fremen are Zensunni - "What is beyond doubt is that the Zensunni belief was an amalgam of two ancient religions: Sunni Islam and Zen Buddhism" says https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Zensunni .

Take Islam away, and the "Sunni" in "Zensunni" seems pointless.

Perhaps the pointlessness is intentional. The religions and philosophies of Dune bear little resemblance to modern-day religion, as though in 20k years only the names have remained unchanged. Zensunni in particular seems to mostly reference Zen buddhism style meditation, although there are also calls to prayer.

I do not known enough to have a discussion about the level of resemblance to modern-day religions.

But the text shows that some aspects of modern-day religion are still present. Here are two examples from Children of Dune:

The O.C. Bible has "Maleficos non patieris vivere", from the Latin Vulgate, Exodus 22:18. In KJV this is translated as "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live", which is also the translation used in the story - https://archive.org/details/dunemessiahchild0000herb/page/26... .

And knowledge of St. Thomas of Canterbury (saint in the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion) survives:

> Leto crouched in the lee of his dune and waited for the night to settle into its own rhythms. Patience and caution—caution and patience. For a time he amused himself by reviewing Chaucer’s route from London to Canterbury, listing the places from Southwark: two miles to the watering-place of St. Thomas, five miles to Deptford, six miles to Greenwich, thirty miles to Rochester, forty miles to Sittingbourne, fifty-five miles to Boughton under Blean, fifty-eight miles to Harbledown, and sixty miles to Canterbury. It gave him a sense of timeless buoyancy to know that few in his universe would recall Chaucer or know any London except the village on Gansireed. St. Thomas was preserved in the Orange Catholic Bible and the Azhar Book, ... - https://archive.org/details/dunemessiahchild0000herb/page/43...

This implies that at least a couple current views of religion remain.

"The Fremen are Chechens: “Sabres of Paradise” as inspiration for Dune" [1]

[1] https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/01/21/the-fremen-are...

Anyone who tries to infer something from the writing should always remember about a blue curtains.

Now you're just picking words. The fact is, on one level, he was right. On another, delusional.

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