After you've watched Dune: Part Three: five words and a warning

If you have just come out of the cinema, you will have seen what happens after the hero wins. In Dune: Part Two, Paul Atreides rode the sandworms to victory and the crowds called him their messiah. Dune: Part Three, adapting Frank Herbert's 1969 novel Dune Messiah, picks up years later. Paul is Emperor. His followers have carried his name across the stars in a holy war. And he can see, more clearly than anyone, what it has cost.

Herbert always said this was the point. Dune was never meant to be the story of a hero. It was meant to be a warning. And the words he used to tell it, Mahdi, Lisān al-Ghayb, Muad'Dib, Usul and jihad, were borrowed from Arabic and from Islam.

In the makers' own words

“superheroes are disastrous for humankind”

Frank Herbert, July 1980 · 'Dune Genesis', Omni

“Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power”

Frank Herbert, July 1980 · 'Dune Genesis', Omni

“'Dune Messiah' was written in reaction to the fact that people perceived Paul Atreides as a hero.”

Denis Villeneuve, to Empire, reported 28 August 2023 · SlashFilm, 'Why Dune director Denis Villeneuve wants to adapt Dune: Messiah'

“My adaptation [of 'Dune'] is closer to his idea that it's actually a warning.”

Denis Villeneuve, to Empire, reported 28 August 2023 · SlashFilm

“thoroughly Muslim”

Haris Durrani, on Herbert's Dune novels, 18 October 2021 · 'The Muslimness of Dune', Tor.com

The warning Herbert wrote

Frank Herbert spent years researching Dune. He read about deserts, ecology and religion, and drew on the history of Muslim lands, including a book about Imam Shamil, who led resistance to the Russian Empire in the Caucasus. In 1980 he explained in Omni magazine what he had been trying to say: 'superheroes are disastrous for humankind'. His advice to readers was blunt: 'Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power.'

Many readers of the first novel missed it and cheered Paul as a hero. So Herbert wrote Dune Messiah. Denis Villeneuve has said the same thing about his films: 'Dune Messiah was written in reaction to the fact that people perceived Paul Atreides as a hero,' and his own version is 'closer to his idea that it's actually a warning'. In Part Two he gave much of that warning to Chani, who watches the crowds and does not kneel. In Part Three, the warning is the whole story: a man who could see the future, who became a god to millions, and who cannot stop what he started.

Five words, and what they really mean

Mahdi. In Arabic, mahdī means 'the guided one', from the same root as al-Hādī, 'the Guide', one of the Names of God. In Islam it refers to a figure many Muslims expect near the end of time, who will 'fill the earth with fairness and justice as it has been filled with oppression and tyranny', according to a hadith in the collection of Abu Dawud (4282). Sunni and Shia Muslims understand the Mahdi in different ways, and history has seen many false claimants. In Dune, the Fremen use the word for Paul, but Paul's role was planted in their legends by the Bene Gesserit as propaganda. He is a manufactured messiah, not the Mahdi of Islam.

Lisān al-Ghayb. This means 'the tongue of the Unseen'. Al-ghayb, the Unseen, is everything only God knows: 'And with Him are the keys of the Invisible. None but He knoweth them. And He knoweth what is in the land and the sea. Not a leaf falleth but He knoweth it, not a grain amid the darkness of the earth, naught of wet or dry but (it is noted) in a clear record.' (Qur'an 6:59 · Pickthall). In Persian culture, Lisān al-Ghayb is also an honorary title of the much-loved fourteenth-century poet Hafez of Shiraz. The Fremen call Paul a voice from the Unseen. Islam teaches that the Unseen belongs to God alone.

Muad'Dib. Herbert's name for Paul echoes the Arabic muʾaddib, 'one who teaches', especially one who teaches adab, good manners and character. In the novel it is also the name of a small desert mouse. Usul. Paul's secret Fremen name means 'the base of the pillar'. In Arabic uṣūl means principles or foundations, as in uṣūl al-fiqh, the principles of Islamic law. The historian Juan Cole set these meanings out in 2024; the Muslim writer Haris Durrani has shown how deeply Islamic ideas run through the novels, which he calls 'thoroughly Muslim' as well as orientalist.

Jihad, and the struggle with the self

The hardest word is jihad. In Herbert's novels the 'jihad' is a galactic holy war that kills billions. The films use 'holy war' instead. But it matters what the word means to the nearly two billion people whose religion it comes from.

In Arabic, jihād means striving or making an effort. The Qur'an uses it for every kind of effort for God: 'As for those who strive in Us, We surely guide them to Our paths, and lo! Allah is with the good.' (29:69, Pickthall). It can include fighting, but the Qur'an tightly limits that: 'Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.' (2:190, Pickthall), and permission was given to those 'Sanction is given unto those who fight because they have been wronged; and Allah is indeed Able to give them victory.' (22:39, Pickthall). It also says 'There is no compulsion in religion. The right direction is henceforth distinct from error. And he who rejecteth false deities and believeth in Allah hath grasped a firm handhold which will never break. Allah is Hearer, Knower.' (2:256, Pickthall). A war to spread a ruler's cult across the galaxy is the opposite of all of that.

Muslim teachers also speak of jihād al-nafs, the struggle with one's own self: against selfishness, anger and pride. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (peace be upon him) said, 'The one who truly strives is the one who strives against his own self' (Tirmidhi 1621). A well-known saying calls this 'the greater jihad'; scholars grade its chain as weak, but the idea is grounded in sayings like the one above. In that sense, the tragedy of Paul is that he wins every war except the one inside himself.

How to watch it, and what to ask

Dune is a story, not a lesson in religion, and it does not need defending or attacking. Some Muslims enjoy it for taking Islamic ideas seriously in a science fiction future; Durrani has said it gave readers a fully realised science fiction future in which Islam was taken seriously. Others are uneasy that the most Islamic words in modern popular culture belong to a story about fanatics. Both reactions are understandable.

The best way to honour Herbert's warning is to do what he asked: keep thinking. Ask who gains when people stop asking questions. Ask what true guidance looks like. All three Abrahamic faiths give the same test: real guidance makes people more just, more merciful and more honest, never less.

The Names this touches

Al-Hādī: The Guide: 'Mahdi' means the one He guides, not the one who replaces Him.

Ar-Rashīd: The Guide to the right course, who never leads astray.

Al-ʿAlīm: The All-Knowing, who holds the keys of the Unseen (6:59).

NamesThe Guideal-Hādī

NamesThe Guide to the right pathar-Rashīd

The All-Knowing

NamesThe All-Knowingal-ʿAlīm

What each faith says

Go deeper

• Haris Durrani, 'The Muslimness of Dune' (Tor.com, 2021) · essay
• Juan Cole, Dune's Islamic dimension (Informed Comment, 10 March 2024) · article
• Frank Herbert, 'Dune Genesis' (Omni, July 1980) · article
• Qur'an 29:69 with translations · scripture
• Deuteronomy 13 (JPS 1917) · scripture
• Matthew 24 (Bible Gateway, WEB) · scripture