The Fremen are described as “Zensunni wanderers,” but, so far as I can tell, nothing in their beliefs shows any Buddhist or Muslim influence.
I don’t know if there’s any real answer to this except that Herbert decided that obviously there would be many syncretic religions in the future, so he didn’t have to explain them:
Still silly. The Fremen do not seek enlightenment through meditation, and their worship of sandworms would have horrified Mohammed.
Dune takes place 20,000 years in the future. Lord only knows if we’d even recognize any of today’s faiths at that point.
I didn’t say that it wasn’t silly. In fact, when I read Dune umpteen years ago, I thought the mix of religions was a little odd. But as jayjay points out, the history of those religions is supposed to be about ten or twenty times as long as the history of them is now.
I asked my Jewish friend if she could access her other memories, and she gave me the strangest look.
Mixed with several long periods in which little to no communication between relatively distant planets was possible. It’s not as if that 20,000 year history was a continuous timeline. I’ll admit that I’m a devotee of the Dune Encyclopedia, and a pretty bitter denunciator of those abortions that Herbert fils and Anderson the Hack have been publishing. There are several mentions in the DE of a couple of distinct Dark Ages in the galactic portion of that 20,000 years.
Strange religions spring up in isolated civilizations.
There are a lot of Muslim references in the Fremen language. You can start with “jihad,” and the fact that Paul is referred to as “the mahdi” and the Fremen army is the “fedaykin,” which is very close to “fedayeen.” I thought the Fremen were meant to be latter day Muslims, mutated over the millenia.
They live in the desert and control the one substance that makes modern life and travel possible, and Herbert was never much for subtlety.
A lot of the testing and wisdom is in the form of riddles, similar to Zen koans. Also, note that the Fremen are not the only Zensunni, nor are their beliefs an untampered system, thanks to the Missionaria Protectiva.
But considered the work was first published in 1963, you have to credit him with some foresight.
Why? OPEC was created in 1960, and in 1963, the middle east provided 1/3 of the oil supply to the US and western Europe. It’s not like “My God, the Arabs control the world’s oil supply” was particularly insightful.
Well, considering OPEC was founded in 1960, he was just keeping tabs on current history, wasn’t it?
My theory is that Frank Herbert wanted to use the thesis-antithesis-synthesis idea to explain how religions might develop. So he picked religions that were polar opposites and fused their names together. Thus, “Orange Catholic” and “Zensunni”.
And it had for the whole century been a venue for colonial impositions, proxy conflict, covert subversion and outright direct imperial intervention. However, relatively to the general popular culture of the time, which pretty much left the concern of “hey, if these guys one day get their act together under some unifying force, we’ll have trouble” to policy wonks and thus felt blindsided in '73, Herbert may be credited as someone who was at least paying attention.
People forget that OPEC was founded as a defensive measure by the oil countries. Hard as it may be to believe today, the United States and other big oil consumers had the power and they played the various oil producers off against each other. In fact. the specific trigger that led to the formation of OPEC was the United States passing a law in 1960 that set a quota on how much oil countries could sell to the United States. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia decided that rather than let the United States and other countries tell them how much oil they could sell, they would band together and present a united front and thereby take control of the oil market. Obviously this plan worked out pretty well for them over time but the power shift was not immediate. The early years were spend getting organized and OPEC didn’t really flex its muscles until the 1973 embargo.
Thanks for the history lesson. Nonetheless, the Fremen were clearly intended to be descendants of Muslims, regardless of the situation with OPEC when Herbert wrote the book. Besides the obvious linguistic links, the concept of desert people who control the substance, located under the sand, upon which human society depends to function, is too close a parallel to be denied.
I’m just glad that Frank’s son and some other hack writer didn’t piss all over his grave by writing a series of novels detailing the whole backstory of Dune, including the origins of the Fremen and such abominations as the Zenshiites. That would have been terrible.
looks for the “thumbs up” smiley
I agree. But my point was that Herbert’s inspiration was not obvious except in retrospect. Islamic culture was still fairly obscure to the popular conscious in the early sixties.
Another inspiration for Dune was probably the publication of Silent Spring in 1962. The science of ecology was just coming to public attention at the time Herbert published his novel. I wouldn’t be surprised if the desert setting was chosen as much for its ecological symbolism as it was for its Islamic ones.