Dune and Ibn Khaldun
A movie review of sci-fi's great homage to a 14th century Arab philosopher
Greetings,
This week, I’ve got a movie review. Last Friday I at long last got to see Dune in the theaters. As a long-time fan of the book, I had keyed myself up to see it when it was to be released last fall and was mightily disappointed when COVID delayed the debut for another year. It’s now here, and I really enjoyed it, although this doesn’t mean that it was a successful movie.
First, the bad. I suspect that this movie is going to be largely incomprehensible to those who have not read the book and to the extent that it is comprehensible I am not sure how compelling it’s going to be. Dune is science fiction set in Tolkien-esque world building, and the original novel deliberately throws readers into the deep end of the narrative and lets them flail for a while. It’s also striking in that the novel has a true omniscient narrator, which means that the readers are in the heads of all of the characters simultaneously. The result is a story in which there is relatively little action and much of the depth and interest of the narrative comes from seeing the differing thoughts of the characters. This is inherently difficult to film. The other problem with the narrative is that it is deliberately structured so as to fragment the story, particularly in the beginning. This is because the plot revolves in part around the emerging prescience of Paul Atreides, but at least initially that prescience is a matter of visualizing multiple possible futures that he might navigate. Visually, however, this means that much of the movie consists of dream sequences, some of which are then directly contradicted by the later action of the movie. One would be forgiven as a viewer from thinking, “What the hell is happening?” Finally, the movie covers only the action of the first half of the book. You thus have to wait for the sequel to get any kind of resolution of the plot lines, many of which frankly don’t make sense yet if you haven’t read the book.
So why did I love the movie? First and foremost, I loved it because it is visually stunning. Indeed, as a fan of the book one of the chief pleasures of the movie is to see how the production designers have visually realized the world of the books. There are also some interesting choices that the script writers made that surprised me. First, they focused a great deal of Caladan, meaning that much of the movie consist of narrative that constitutes at most the first chapter or two of the books. Second, they have flattened out the society of Dune as presented in the book considerably. Understandably, the Fremen of the desert figure prominently, as they must for the story – especially the parts that will appear in the sequel – to make sense. What is entirely missing is any sense of the society of Arakeen (the capital city of Arrakis) before the epic battles and betrayals of the plot take over. This is too bad, I think, because it deprives the book of some of its more interesting philosophical roots.
Dune as a novel is very much a product of the 1960s with its emphasis on drugs – the spice – and the link between drugs and religion understood as both an eclectic mix of spiritualities and as a tool to be cynically manipulated by elites. However, the story also draws extensively on the theories of the 14th century Arab philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun. As I recently learned in reading a biography of Ibn Khaldun the connections here isn’t accidental. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, read the English translation of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah and stated that it influenced his story.
Ibn Khaldun wrote in the century after the height of the Arab caliphate that took over the Middle East and North Africa in the period immediately after the rise of Islam. In the century before his birth, Arab empire had been decisively defeated when the Mongols sacked Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate, in 1258. He was thus fascinated by the question of how empires rise and why they fall.
This is a question that has entranced western thinkers as well. They generally view the question through the lens of the Roman Empire rather than the Arab Empire. The most influential writer on the topic, of course, is Edward Gibbon, who tells the story largely from the Roman point of view and sees the fall of the empire as resulting from the collapse of Rome’s civic and republican virtue, largely as a result the enervating force of Christianity. Ibn Khaldun, however, looks at this question through the lens of the original wave of Arab conquests in the decades after the death of the Prophet. For Gibbon the barbarian hoards are a kind of constant geopolitical force that is always lurking off-stage waiting to pounce on Roman weakness. Ibn Khaldun, on the other hand, sees the story from the point of view of the “barbarian” outsiders, who he presents as both complex and dynamic.
According to Ibn Khaldun, the initial Arab conquests were a result of the fierce solidarity created by the conditions of semi-nomadic desert tribesmen. It’s important to realize that, while Ibn Khaldun wrote in Arabic, when he romanticizes Bedouin tribal warriors he is talking about a society that is far removed from the urban world of the Arab caliphate that he inhabited. In his theory of history, this primitive tribal elan has the power to sweep all before it through brute military effectiveness. However, it becomes a victim of its own success. Eventually the tribesmen settle down to enjoy the fruits of their conquests in the cities, which of course destroys the fierce desert solidarity that was the original basis of their power. Eventually they are displaced by a new generation of tribal warriors, as when the Mongols and the Turks displaced the Arab masters of the Middle East after 1258.
Not only does Ibn Khaldun invert Gibbon’s point of view in the narrative of empire v. tribesman, he also inverts historical stories based on European imperialism. As we tell the story of western expansion after 1492, we tend to see it in terms of a technologically and militarily potent center that then extends its power further and further afield at the expense of tribal societies. In contrast, for Ibn Khaldun the key historical moment is when the metropolis succumbs to the tribal forces of the periphery.
All of this should be recognizable to any reader of Dune. The Fremen are Ibn Khaldun’s Arabs. The Padashah Emperor and the various noble houses are the Persian and Byzantine empires that they displaced. Lest you miss the reference, “Padashah” is a title that is transparently based on the Persian term for emperor, “shah.” The Persian Empire, of course, was one of the two great powers that the Arabs swept away during the first wave of conquests. However, in the original book the non-Fremen dwellers of Arakeen are an important part of the historical argument. They represent the decadence and degradation that happens when the purity of tribal solidarity, with all of its harshness and violence, is compromised. Hence, in the movie half of Ibn Khaldun’s argument – which was adopted by Herbert – is left at best implicit.
Maybe will get to see all of this in the sequel.
See you next week,
Nate
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