Dune 2 and Gaza

What if life followed fiction and Gaza was explained by Dune 2? Sigh. It isn’t. 

The first time I saw Lawrence of Arabia I was confounded by a heady mix of British colonial self-righteousness, macho underdog confidence, and the desert power of an Arabic uprising.

It was as if Jesus had decided to take on the Roman Empire and then won. 

It’s a really tempting slippery slope to read that same inevitable win of the good guys against the bad guys in Dune 2.

Dune 2 builds on Dune 1 as a compelling cultural hybrid if you know your Middle Eastern history at all.

In Dune you have a very powerful spiritual order whose ambition to organise kingdoms goes deep into organising bloodlines for multiple generations back and into the future. They are called the Bene Gesserit, an all-female order that anyone would recognise from any other clandestine order of nuns in the mid-Medieval age. Their power in court will be familiar the muscular Christianity of orders such as the Order of Saint Benedict, Cistercian Order, or the Jesuits.

In Dune you also have a desert people who live within rock-bound oases and are energised by a prophecy about a leader that will rise. In 622 CE, the initial band of Muslims expanded into an army of about 10,000. They moved upon the city of Makkan. Unlike Dune they conquered it not by force of arms but by negotiation. 

Dune also has a really clear saviour-figure one could recognise with many of his moves from the New Testament. He has of course special powers provided by his mother. Yet his mother is no sainted Mother Mary, but rather an expert in the Weirding Way which is a form of martial arts that emphasises the use of incredible speed to overcome opponents in hand-to-hand and bladed combat.

And of course there’s the purpose of the empire being on Arrakis in the first place, which is to mine and process the spice Melange. The spice has massively accelerated interstellar travel and galaxial connectedness. It dominates international trade. It has made a handful of great families excessively powerful and rich. So there you have the basic political analogue of the spice being oil, Arrakis being the Arabian peninsula, and the great families being those who control and exploit that production to retain and grow their power. 

It is true that many of the religious words in the Dune series are derived from debased, modified or altered Arabic language and Islamic elements. In the 6 original Dune books the guiding spiritual structure is from the Orange Catholic Bible, a concordance of elements from what is termed Navachristianity, Buddhislam, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism and the Maometh Saari religion. It really does help if you have at least a working glossary knowledge of the Big 4 religions to get into the books properly.

In the mid-Middle Ages you also have a set of very weak states that are increasingly stitched together through arranged marriages, and this is very clearly a central core of Dune 2. Paul Atreides has to make quite a tough choice of female partner towards the end, but I won’t spoil it. 

Like Christianity, much is made of the legitimacy of Paul Atreides by foreshadowing that he must be the saviour because he does what writers prophecised many hundreds of years beforehand. For those familiar with Matthew and Luke in the Bible, those writers go to great lengths to demonstrate Jesus had to be the Christ  saving the Jewish people because he shows what he did was what prophets before him said he would do. Welcome to religious logic.

Lawrence of Arabia was filmed in 1961 and released in 1962. It was based on the book written by T. E. Lawrence in 1926, about exploits he had in 1915-1917. That movie is certainly true to life in that it shows that after their first good set of victories over the Turks, the Arabs just could not organise themselves into a new pan-Arabic alliance. Israel is barely mentioned across the entire thing. But it did show that an outside could show them how to win, and did so.

Dune, however, goes into the deep end of presuming that a group bearing a close resemblance to the first 50 years of Islam in it is initial uprising, and to Hamas, would unite all desert peoples into a vast righteous collective of primitive goodness that will wipe away the corruption of the great houses and subdue all of them. And of course, that the great planetary desert will be transformed into a great green and pleasant land of rivers and wavy fields and the like. None of that has happened or will happen.

Gaza will not be rising, nor will Hamas. They will barely cling on. No one from any of the Arabic great houses is coming to save them. Do not be pulled into the romance of the righteous weak overcoming those bloated by power and greed. 

If Dune were an analogue for the Palestinian cause of nationhood, the arc of history would dissolve into a cloud of suffering and the usual reliance on victor morality writing history would save none of them. Bad luck there. Morality and history alike are written only by the victors.

Dune isn’t the story you are looking for. 

BUt you definitely should see the movie anyway.