Frank Herbert’s Dune and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses
How 50 years of fiction has shaped the Middle East
In 1989, following the release of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Ayatolla Khomeini, supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa against the author, condemning him to death on the grounds that his content was blasphemy of the highest charge. The book in question follows Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, two Indian men who fall from a plane hijacked by Sikh terrorists. Upon crash-landing on the shores of England, they each undergo transfigurative mutations; Gibreel to a glowing, angelic seer and Saladin to a Baphomet-esque devil. Their narrative becomes interwoven with a series of visions about the desert city of Jahira and a religious leader called Mahound, a thinly veiled cipher for the inauguration of Islam. Barring the question of whether The Satanic Verses merits such severe denunciation for its heretical infractions, it can undoubtably be acknowledged that while Islam plays a prominent role in Rushdie’s work, the novel also deals with the themes of alienation, immigration, family, colonialism, and the sense of identity which is necessarily (but not always successfully) cultivated among these constituents.
Similar themes may be found in Frank Herbert’s seminal science fiction work, Dune, published in 1965. Its namesake setting, a hostile desert planet, and its indigenous inhabitants, the Fremen, borrow heavily from Islamic and Arabic culture. Etymologically, much of Dune’s lexicon is either derivative or directly appropriated from the Arabic language, and the inspiration for its fictive religious practices are an amalgamation of Christian, Buddhist, and Islamic faiths. A major plot point revolves around the economic dispersion of melange, a commodity produced by the desert planet and commodified by the galactic bourgeoisie. As such, it behooves the modern science-fiction reader to juxtapose Rushdie’s and Herbert’s work and explore the social and political contexts under which they were penned.
In 1953, the CIA, under the administration of senior officer Kermit Roosevelt, orchestrated a coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran. Mossadegh’s decision to withdraw from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and nationalise Iran’s petroleum industry had stoked British anxiety that oil capital would fall into communist hands. Subsequently, the British implemented a boycott against Iranian oil. With the help of the United States Government, Britain successfully installed a new prime minister, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, whose position was continuously held until the Iranian revolution in 1979.
In 1979, the Iranian revolution, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, incited a frenetic rash of protests and successfully toppled the Shah’s rule. In collusion with US president Jimmy Carter, Khomeini was able to return from exile in Paris and usurp the Shah’s rule, instating himself as Supreme Leader and achieving an accord with the US military interest presiding over Iran’s oil supply. Despite the Ayatollah’s castigation of the United States as the “Great Satan,” his vested interest in its alliance demonstrates to a resounding degree the extent to which mutual contempt would be suspended under the looming Soviet threat.
Both The Satanic Verses and Dune bear witness to the profound impact of these legislative ambulations. Furthermore, the vast degree of disparity between the political undertones of these works, both steeped in Islamic influence, may well be somewhat attributable the historical caesura produced by the Iranian Revolution.
The Satanic Verses and post-colonialism
The Satanic Verses has often been described as a work of postcolonial fiction. Its protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin, are both Indian men who have attempted in some way to Westernise themselves, both in an attempt to further their acting careers and in a quest for self-identification. In the process, each has undergone transformative processes, which are further catalysed by physical mutations. Gibreel’s transformation truly begins when he relinquishes Islam and begins an an extramarital affair with an English woman, Alleluia Cone. Saladin’s transformation begins with a harrowing return to India, which also leads to a lapse in fidelity with an Indian woman, his childhood friend Zeeny Vakil. The fact that these trysts are what launches the main characters into their journeys suggests that there is something particularly pregnant about treachery. It also suggests that these relationships represent a microcosmic version of Gibreel and Saladin’s relationship to their cultural and national identity. Both men hail from the same birthplace, yet while Saladin’s betrayal is to his adopted English identity, Gibreel’s is to his Indian and Muslim identity. Thus, the question of indigene is posed as one that is fundamentally unstable. In a symmetrical fashion, this quest for indigene is ultimately resolved by transformations that are also to be considered acts of violence. Through his rage at Gibreel — who betrayed him by standing idly by while he was arrested as an illegal immigrant — Saladin’s monstrous form dissipates. Gibreel, on the other hand, receives a series of visions, believing himself to be divinely inspired, and subsequently his deluded mental state wrecks havoc on his surroundings. In a fit of jealousy, believing his wife unfaithful, he murders the guilty parties and then shoots himself.
The unfaithfulness present in Saladin and Gibreel’s personal lives is congruent with the political treachery which Rushdie critiques in Gibreel’s visions, which revolve around the mythical ancient city of Jahira and the modern village of Titlipur. The former presents the self-appointed prophet Mahound as a shrewd businessman who is himself a sort of colonial appropriator by seeking to vilify the gods and goddesses of Jahira, introduce monotheism, and acquire power in the process. The latter is a parody of Khomeini’s exile and of the religious fundamentalism that accompanied his regime. The Imam’s exile and the protagonist’s immigration are shown here to share a form of betrayal. Rushdie writes:
In exile the shower goes scalding hot whenever anybody turns on a kitchen tap, so that when the Imam goes to bathe his entire retinue must remember not to fill a kettle or rinse a dirty place…In exile no food is ever cooked; the dark-spectacled bodyguards go out for take-away. In exile all attempts to put down roots look like treason: they are admissions of a defeat.
The former Shah of Iran is represented by Ayesha, a character whose namesake is Mohammad’s youngest wife. Another figure with the same name surfaces in the Titlipur plot as a religious fanatic who leads a suicide mission to Mecca. Rushdie’s motif of transformation also reflects the changing face of Islam in the Western world. Khomeini’s program espoused an Islamic fundamentalism which became inexorably linked to the political climate of the Middle East. The Satanic Verses exemplifies this historical trajectory in its darkly satirical story of a pilgrimage turned suicide pact. The nomenclature of Ayesha also links the corruption in Khomeini’s regime to what Rushdie frames as a corruption autochthonous to Islamic law itself. The challenge for Saladin and Gibreel is how to make sense of their cultural identity given this convoluted heritage. This, in turn, necessitates its own kind of religious conversion, which Gibreel so poignantly syllogises when he says that to be born again, “first you have to die.” In Satanic Verses, the protagonists’ relationship to Islam is inexorably tied to the way that the religion has been politicised, and their immigrant status is thus concordant with the plight of Mahound and his disciples. Even the turbulent nature of their own careers as actors is rife with the same kind of betrayal, jealousy, and antagonism displayed by both the theological disputes of Jahira and the political opponents of the 1970’s world stage.
The Jahira arc in The Satanic Verses warrants a special juxtaposition to Dune. In the latter, a key element of Herbert’s religious world is the existence of the Bene Gesserit, a clandestine, matriarchal order whose operation involves the dissemination of religious falsehoods which serve to advance the general will of humanity. In Rushdie’s Islam allegory, Mahound’s decisions are fiscally motivated, rather than communitarian. Indeed, the decisions enforced by his prophetic edicts are hotly divisive. Likewise, Ayesha’s pilgrimage is fanatical, more than anything else, but its religious lucre is recognised by its naysayers, for “wealth is an excellent goddess for a businessman.” In contrast, the religion of the Fremen and the Bene Gesserit both acknowledge the interplay of politics and religion. The differences in how these works of fiction relate to the concept of organised religion lobbies a political message that confers with their respective historical milieus. It may well be that the overthrowing of a democratically elected leader a la the 1953 coup proved that the interest of the people was under threat of succumbing to a higher power — that of big business. By the Iranian Revolution, this power source had become much more solidified as part of a political-religious monolith, which in a large part is what Rushdie critiques.
Interestingly, the city of Jahira, a city of sand which one book review, incidentally, described as “a wink to Frank Herbert” contains the same metaphor of sand versus water which features so prominently in Dune (Carter). Hind, the ruler of Jahira’s wife, tells Mahound:
“You are sand and I am water,”
“Water washes sand away.”
“And the desert soaks up water,” Hind answers him. “Look around you”
The disciples of Mahound and their aquaphilia stand in harsh opposition to the “the very stuff of inconstancy,” sand, which with its “old, shifting, provisional quality” comes to stand for the plurality of their religious figures and the cultural influence of their archaic sediment. Water, on the other hand, is posed to be a “a liquid catastrophe” which would destroy the people’s way of life and advent a tidal wave of change. Similarly, the titular sand waves of Dune are the very fabric of their inhabitant’s livelihoods and belief systems and a manual for desert survival in the book reads more like a religious text than a field guide. Water and sand are fitting symbols for a dichotomy between new and old, as well as purity and uncleanness. Water has theological associations with baptism and rebirth, while sand is associated with the primordial originality of the past. These motifs manifest in a similar fashion in The Satanic Verses and Dune, albeit with a slightly different result. In The Satanic Verses, water ultimately triumphs over the city of sand, revoking its former glory in order to pave the way for the rise of a new religious epoch. Water also facilitates the death of Ayesha’s followers. In Dune, the sand-dwellers come out victorious in part due to the transmutation of a substance called “The Water of Life,” a potent poison which the protagonists are able to neutralise, allowing them to become stronger and more powerful through their immunity to it. Culturally and historically, this application suggests a much more optimistic vision for the future of humanity and more specifically, the belief that countries in the Third World would ultimately be able to benefit from contact with First World powers. The steady devolution of peaceful relations between the United States and its foreign allies, in turn, is thrown into sharp relief in Rushdie’s work.
Dune and colonialism
If The Satanic Verses is post-colonial magical realism, then Dune might well fall into the realm of ‘colonial science fiction.’ Its plot revolves around two competing aristocracies, House Atreides and House Harkonnen, in a diplomatic feud over the resources of the desert planet, Araknis. The Harkonnens have relinquished this planet to their rivals, but with nefarious ulterior motives. The main protagonist, Paul Atreides, is forced to go rogue after his father, the Duke, is assassinated by dint of a coup to place the Harkonnens back in control. Paul, finding himself in cooperation with the indigenous peoples of Araknis, the Fremen, assimilates into their culture and subsequently becomes identified as their messiah, or Muad’Dib, which means ‘teacher’ or ‘tutor.’ I will suggest that these plot points mirror the political events of 1953, precipitated by the competing interests of Iranian petroleum. Additionally, the fact that Paul and his family — who as members of the dominant ruling class, are coded as white — suggests that at this juncture in time, Western sympathies towards Middle Eastern alliances were still strong. The fact that religious fundamentalism had not yet become an object of fear in the Western zeitgeist is evident in the liberal application of terminology associated by more modern audiences with mounting concerns of international terrorism. As Muad’Dib, Paul is prophetically ordained to incite a jihad, or holy war, and usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Usage of the term has since become synonymous with movements like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, yet in the historical context of Dune, it is arguably much more congruous with the original usage of the term. However, the role of jihad in Herbert’s novel may well still merit some exploration in the context of United States-Iran ally-ship. In the third act, Paul is able to defeat the Harkonnens by deploying his family’s nuclear arsenal against Dune’s capital and threatening to destroy the planet’s supply of melange, thus stripping of the Galactic Empire of their power.
Given that fiction is intended to be read (at least partially) in a metaphorical register, it seems curious, if not outright scandalous, that a protagonist who represents the coloniser should side with the colonised, Middle-Eastern-coded denizens whose religious beliefs serve to threaten the Imperialist prerogative. Even more so does this seem the case, given the employment of nuclear weapons and the proximity between the Cold War and the 1953 election which centrifuged around fear of such technology. Why, then, has Dune, unlike The Satanic Verses, remained so relatively unscrutinised by the public, despite its ability to be read in such radical terms? One possible explanation is simply that the book’s subtext simply didn’t register very well with the public. Initially it was met with poor reviews and a rash of flummoxed critics who shirked at the story’s dearth of laser-battles and surfeit of religious jargon. Another reason might simply have to do with the fact that writing a science-fiction or science-fantasy piece grants a certain degree of subtextual leniency that cannot safely be granted to fiction which takes place in ‘our’ universe, even if ‘Mohammad’ is changed to ‘Mahound’ and ‘Mecca’ to ‘Jahira.’ The use of much more subtle allegories in Dune has allowed the novel to age saliently, almost presciently so, in tune with the political climate of the present day and the retrospective past. In contrast, not only did The Satanic Verses resound as odiously across the religious and political world as Luther’s Theses, but it successfully augered a sustained political anxiety surrounding the Middle East. Both of these works are to be lauded for their resonant impact on popular culture; one for teaching us that fiction can be political, the other for teaching us that politics are stranger than fiction.
