I'm excited about this, even if somehow, tens of thousands of years in the future, Hollywood thinks jihad is taboo. Herbert defined jihad as a crusade and saw them as interchangeable.

(Paul does use "crusade" in a vision, but choosing that single instance over jihad is telling) https://twitter.com/dunemovie/status/1303729548563902464

Academics like to see the story as an allegory about the past but good literature isn't based on a single historical event, it draws from many sources. Herbert said this. Dune, for him, was an exploration of ecological time and how the Messianic impulse is ultimately destructive

I think both @shahanSean, who suggests the Abbasid revolution, and @michael_pregill, who suggests the Fatimids, are right, but you could easily relate it to the Mahdi of Sudan and even T.E. Lawrence too - both of whom Herbert had explicitly referenced!

Dune is also a Shi'i tinged reading of the dramas of early Islam, and Herbert remarked in passing that Alia is based on Ali. Of course, this is a fantasy about the future. In Dune's timeline, there have been three Muhammads before the events of the book.

Herbert is a theorist. One crucial claim he made is that space travel, if possible, would drastically change religions by breaking their cosmologies. The mix of religions couched in Islamicate vocabulary that fill his work is a vision of how humans would accomodate that change.

The other thing I'm interested in is that Dune shows how the sources of the 1950s, when he did most of his research, allowed for a different reading of Islam, both in terms of what was "orthodoxy" as well as its broader cosmology.

But even then, reviewers point blank asked him what was up with "all the Islam," a question he'd awkwardly dance around. Ultimately, what is even more telling is how his audience and later interpreters dealt with all that Islam. In that vein, this latest iteration will be telling

Herbert tried, with imperfections, to write about humans, a story in which Arabs, Muslims, and non-Western peoples were integral. He emphatically said that he is tired of "Western mythology" and "Western man," but his interpreters tend to re-inscribe these things into his story.

This is all taken from archival research I've done for an article about Frank Herbert's Dune! Hoping to get it out soon, positive vibes, energies, duas, prayers, incantations are all appreciated.