2/27/2023 0 Comments A tale in the desert 7![]() ![]() Ali Karjoo-Ravary, assistant professor of Islamic Studies at Bucknell University, noted the language choice in an October 2020 Al Jazeera column. In September 2020, the first trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One was released, with a prominent focus on the term “crusade” rather than “jihad.” (Neither “jihad” nor “crusade” makes it into Dune: Part One instead, Villeneuve and fellow screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth settle on “holy war.”) Dr. Literary scholars who have analyzed Dune note them as essential components of Herbert’s narrative arc, yet movie and TV versions of Dune tend to diminish their importance, or leave them out entirely. All are terms that Herbert uses throughout Dune, and all are pulled from MENA languages and culture and Muslim ideology. ![]() Padishah, Sunni, Mahdi, Lisan al Gaib, jihad. (In their Zensunni religion and in their language Chakobsa, derived from Arabic, he is “Mahdi” or “Lisan al Gaib.”) They take Paul in after House Atreides falls and prepare to wage a jihad. The heir of House Atreides, Paul, is the anointed outsider in this story, a possible messiah in the eyes of the Fremen. They mine the spice and mercilessly exploit the planet’s inhabitants, the Fremen. Arrakis is subjugated by the galactic Padishah Empire, and by the royal houses that make up the Imperium (first the monstrous House Harkonnen, and later the more compassionate colonizer House Atreides). In journalist-turned-author Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, the first of six books that has since been adapted into two films and a TV miniseries, the desert is the planet Arrakis, the galaxy’s sole producer of spice, a natural resource that has hallucinogenic properties and also fuels space travel. Gerald Gaylard in his 2010 essay “ Postcolonial Science Fiction: The Desert Planet.” ![]() (See: the Sykes–Picot Agreement.) In literature, especially the sci-fi kind, “issues of travel, migration, alterity, other cultures, colonization, empire” thrive in the arid expanses, argues Dr. ![]() The desert - in particular the region of the world long called the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), but increasingly referred to as West Asia and North Africa (WANA) - has long been a place onto which outsiders could map their own ambitions. In the honeyed, low-pitched tones of Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto Atreides: That’s desert power. And before them all, of course, was Dune’s Paul Atreides. Adrian Veidt, who travels through the Mediterranean and what used to be ancient Persia before calling himself Ozymandias, the Greek name of Pharaoh Ramesses II, in the graphic novel-turned-movie-turned-TV show Watchmen. En Sabah Nur, who grows up in Egypt and renames himself Apocalypse, in the comics X-Men: The Rise of Apocalypse. Luke Skywalker on Tatooine (and Rey Skywalker on Jakku) in the Star Wars film franchise. Indigenous knowledge becomes the outsider’s knowledge, and when that child grows up to become a leader (there is no version of this story in which they do not become a leader), it was the desert people’s expertise and customs that emboldened their ascendence. Amid a harsh landscape of sun and sand, the child learns the ways of that place’s original inhabitants, and a fateful path unfurls. Their lineage is royal and mysterious, and a formidable order with shadowy powers takes an interest in their future. In their adolescence they seem different - special. The sci-fi story has always been about more than just arid expanses, but Denis Villeneuve’s Part One can’t see past the sand.Ī child (usually a boy, sometimes a girl) comes of age in the desert. ![]()
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