The Dune franchise has always left a bad taste in my mouth, with its commodification of Muslim aesthetics while doing nothing to actually uplift Muslim narratives or voices. When I begrudgingly watched the first Dune film back in 2021, it felt like being immersed in a universe that was disorientingly familiar yet hollow.
Vaguely Arabic sounding words like “Ichwan” and “Shai Hulud” and terms outright pillaged from the Islamic faith and the cadence of my ancestors, like “Mahdi” and “Wahad”, are stripped of meaning entirely in this world where Muslimness is exoticised instead of criminalised.
The Fremen’s covered forms and faces are rendered mysterious and ambiguous, free from the trappings of securitisation and threat that Muslim women in the real Western world face.
The vaguely Arab desert backdrop becomes a place of intrigue and mystique (fit, even, to become the backdrop of a glamorous premiere) rather than the underdeveloped sites of war that the Middle East is usually portrayed as.
Words like ‘jihad’ are bandied about with no fear of criminalisation in this fictional paradigm that cloaks itself in Muslimness while further eroding our agency as Muslims.
Frustratingly but not surprisingly, for a film that so heavily borrows from the Arab Muslim world, there are no Middle Eastern actors in the cast. The lack of representation reinforces the overriding Orientalist agenda: our cultures can be attractive and commercial but only if adopted by the white and the wealthy.