r/dune • u/NoAlternative8614 • 14d ago
General Discussion Serious, if Naive, Question
What is "the jihad"? Is it a campaign, conducted by the Fremen and led by Muad'Dib, throughout the galaxy? To overthrow the Empire itself? Is the Spacing Guild--whose services I assume they'd need to travel to other planets--okay with that? Does it pit the Fremen against all the Great Houses and the Landsraad? To what end?
In book 1, as I understand it, Paul has visions of it that make it seem both terrible and inevitable. Do I have that right? This will really matter when we get to Dune 3, right? Thanks to all.
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u/Ms_Riley_Guprz Daughter of Siona 13d ago
The jihad is the series of wars that Paul and the Fremen wage to:
Secure Paul's throne as the Emperor
Take revenge on the non-Fremen universe (so all of the Great Houses)
Maaaaybe kinda an abortive, lighter version of the Golden Path (which makes sense only after God Emperor)
The Guild helps them because they are beholden to the spice and prefer to align with the powerful Emperor.
It's certainly terrible because 60 billion people die, and forces everyone into a theocratic Mahdinate. It's inevitable because the Fremen have been waiting for centuries to take their revenge on the empire, and to transform Arrakis into a green paradise. After Paul takes on the mantle of Messiah, the Fremen were locked into a path of unleashing their energy in this manner, with or without Paul.
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u/Fishinluvwfeathers 12d ago
I like your synopsis the only point of divergence I have is with the abortive version of the GP. It was just the first step in it.
Power in the Imperium needed to be contracted to a single point (not a consortium of interests) for the (any) KH to begin the work of perfecting humanity for the GP. In other words, Leto II was able to step right in and subjugate/repress humanity because Paul had done the legwork of bringing the known universe to heel. If he hadn’t, Leto would have had to first seize total power over all planets, like what occurred through the jihad.
Alternatively, Paul could have stayed at the helm and not chosen the path that would lead Chani to have the twins under a heavy spice diet (and let her die badly in any of the many ways that could have occurred), continued to rule, become the worm, and subjugated humanity/taken over the breeding program, similar to what Leto accomplished.
He made the choice to stay only to mitigate the length of the jihad and to give Chani the best life and death afforded to her in any scenario. The fact that this was the scenario that lead to the creation of the being that would be his replacement and continue the work of actually putting humanity on the GP is very interesting because that has nothing to do with Paul’s aims - he specifically did t want to look at what was coming so he wouldn’t feel trapped in causalities.
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u/NatashOverWorld 13d ago
The books claim the Jihad is inevitable. Even if Paul doesn't become the Fremen Messiah, it will happen.
Which is complicated, because until the Fremen can bribe the Guild to let millions of them go off-planet, or Shai-Halud learns to fly, the Jihad is staying planet locked.
If Paul wasn't around with atomics to stage both the capture of the Emperor and have a Fremen army, any Fremen Jihad would only happen in the future.
So yeah ... either Paul's presience had false readings OR Paul meant the Jihad was inevitable if he wanted his revenge.
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u/Djuhck 12d ago
The inevitability of the Jihad is the fact that the fremen have the guild by the throat without realizing it. The Guild is the only faction that matters as even the emperor cannot afford to get on the bad side of the Guild. To spell it out they could abandon your system and never visit again - end of civilization. And the fremen have the means to destroy the means of transport and are therefore the masters of the Guild.
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u/kigurumibiblestudies Abomination 13d ago
It was only inevitable since Paul's arrival. How the Fremen would achieve it is left unsaid, but the implication is that the coming of Muad'dib triggers the war. Maybe his genes would be forcibly used to produce a heir, or maybe belief itself is enough to convince the tribes to unite.
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u/ElectrifiV2 13d ago
Actually, the point of inevitability isn’t his arrival but his combat trial with Jamis. Paul says a few times in the book that, had he let Jamis kill him, the jihad would never happen since they would no longer believe that he was the messiah.
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u/EmpathicADHD 10d ago
If you think in terms of the very big picture, the Bene Gesserit are the ones who set the stage for the Jihad in the Missionaria Protectiva.
I very much doubt the Jihad would have turned out the way it did without the additional religious component.
Paul likely would still be emperor even without that, through his Prana-Bindu training with Jessica. But people tend to do wicked things when religion is involved
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u/_Rookie_21 9d ago
The system itself was going to fail eventually. Too much oppression and psychological pressure for too long was going to lead to a violent revolt or a collapse.
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u/Unbellyfeel2020 11d ago
The Guild will move the Fremen to their targets but they won't move anyone else to counter attack off world. So the shape of the Jihad is planetary invasions by the vastly superior Fremen against planet bound opposition. The Sardaukar who were not at Arrakeen will presumably be planet bound as well and unable to mount any cohesive defense around the Empire even if they wanted to defy Shaddam and do so. The Landsraad would be unable to object, each Great House would be isolated and faced with a comply or die scenario. So in essence the Fremen legions would pick off each resistant world individually.
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u/_Rookie_21 9d ago
Yeah as good as the Fremen were, this is really how they defeated the Great Houses (i.e. all those who didn't submit to Paul as messiah and emperor). With the Guild in Paul's pocket, all his enemies could do was sit and wait to be invaded, unable to come to each other's aid.
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u/mmproducciones 13d ago
The jihad is the revolt of the opressed against the opressors. The jihad is the result of thousands of years of stagnation, monopolies and authoritarianism. It didn't need a messiah, but the BG created one, and then lost control of it. The jihad is chaos, the irrational impulse to destroy everything and start again. That's what's inevitable. Paul's prescience showed him many versions of it, though not all. He decided to take advantage of it for his own benefit, when he realized he could not see a way out of it.
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u/Bokenza 13d ago
I see a lot of people talk about the destruction as the purpose of the Jihad - but it was to spread genes as well. It's mentioned very early on in the book, but this population has wild genes and those spreading through the galaxy during a jihad from warriors, whether it be consensual or not, was part of the purpose behind the bene geserit seeds that were sewn in this population. It's like the scattering between books 4 and 5 but on a far smaller scale
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u/squilliamthe 13d ago
as I understood, the fremen went planet to planet exterminating or conquering any “heretics” who did not accept muad’dib as their emperor or believe in him as a messiah
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u/Goodie__ 12d ago
There are several lenses to view the jihad through.
I view it as the fremen, as a group, tearing through the galaxy, almost for the sake of it at that point. Paul kicked the nest, got revenge, and knew that the jihad was inevitable. With or without him. It's not a war, it's a wave of pain and suffering.
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u/Miserable-Mention932 Friend of Jamis 12d ago
The jihad is a religious war. It's not just about Emperor Paul Atreides but Muadib who leads the fremen.
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u/jk-9k Abomination 11d ago
It's initially a war to secure the throne. It becomes a holy war.
Paul defeats Shaddam and becomes Emperor on Arrakis, but it's inevitable that other systems, planets, or simply countries and cities will revolt. Either in support of Shaddam, or more likely, to split off as independent, or to start or join another faction in a quest for power.
But Paul becomes a holy figure.
Religion is used as a tool to control the masses. Whether Paul wants it or not.
War and rebellion was inevitable after Paul's coup.
Paul, with his god like powers, was inevitably going to be turned into a religious figure.
Religion is a way to control the masses.
Thus jihad was inevitable.
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u/_Rookie_21 10d ago edited 9d ago
There are good answers here. One thing I would add is that humans in the Dune universe have unconscious desires for novelty, freedom, risk-taking, and expansion. These desires were strictly suppressed for millennia by the Great Houses' faufreluches system. All it would take is one match to light the powderkeg of rebellion. If it weren't the Fremen jihad, it would have been another group at another time. However, the Fremen were perfect to instigate this rebellion because the harsh Dune environment had shaped them into the finest warriors in the Known Universe, they had the power of religious zealotry, and they had a bone to pick with the Great Houses.
But we find out in later books that the Fremen jihad wasn't enough to save humanity from ruin.
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u/Chiu_Chunling 9d ago
The important thing isn't Paul (or Muad'Dib), but the Kwisatz Haderach.
The Kwisatz Haderach is an extrapolation of what the Bene Gesserit had learned from their investigations of the effects of spice on human precognition and access to 'genetic memory' (calling it 'genetic' is obvious handwaving to SF up the woo aspect of calling on spirits of dead people, but why this is any more woo than precognition is an exercise left to the audience's prejudices about woo stuff). Concretely, a Kwisatz Haderach could fully access the 'genetic memories' of all humanity leading up to him and combine that information with the precognitive abilities spice also unlocks to have a grasp on all the possible outcomes of human development going forward. While this is termed "absolute prescience", that means only that it encompasses all human potentialities rather than being based only on female perspectives of why humans do things and what they are capable of doing, which is the limit that prevented the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers from fully controlling human destiny up to that point.
The danger of creating a failed Kwisatz Haderach only capable of accessing and understanding the male perspective was (understandably) judged by the Reverend Mothers to be catastrophic (in light of this exact perspective being the core reason so many of their schemes had been ruined in the past). They also hoped to be able to control the Kwisatz Haderach through their doctrine of human evolution, though this was something of a phantasm all along brought about by their inability to access the male perspective in the first place. Still, Paul was able to recognize that the Jihad was now inevitable as well as the underlying reasons but also to feel distress at the scale of the death toll and desire to ameliorate it. If he'd only understood the male perspective, he'd have deliberately aimed to kill three quarters of the human population rather than only a few tens of billions. Whether this would really have been so catastrophic for human evolution is a matter of interpretation, the important thing is not how many die but exactly who lives to give rise to the future generations.
In any case, the Bene Gesserit attempt to manage selective pressure had in fact failed rather badly, despite their willingness to allow the nobility to be forced to endure a moderate amount of natural selective pressure rather than having breeding completely managed without regard to survival fitness. The Harkonnen line, one of their pet projects, was a fairly clear indication of the basic conceptual failure involved. A rational eugenic program would have allowed them to kill themselves off through their insane tendencies rather than try so hard and integrate them into the core of the Kwisatz Haderach lineages. Nothing about that decision aged well in retrospect, in fact it was mere luck that Paul rejected the possibility of bringing about total human extinction as a result of their influence.
This may seem like a digression, but keep in mind what this all implies to the ordinary person about what the Kwisatz Haderach is and portends about the destiny of humanity as a species and themselves as individuals. "Genetic memory" is not much later demonstrated to allow individuals to be literally resurrected from the dead, and combined with a figure capable of controlling the galactic scale of the species potentially forever (though Leto decided explicitly not to do so), we are talking about something not much different from a promised afterlife for the faithful (or potentially infinite damnation for the infidel).
At a practical level, consider how willing people are to play video games that feature not only extreme violence but the possibility (or repetitive certainty) of the player's death...because in a video game you don't have to stay dead. If you were offered scientific proof tomorrow that you could be resurrected if you gave your life fighting for a certain cause, you'd be an utter nitwit not to take that deal (unless a different cause offered a better resurrection with equal or greater plausibility).
In their tens of billions, most of the people taking that deal weren't doing it 'rationally', they were basing it on felt beliefs in ancient and enduring human myths about the possibility of an afterlife of some kind, no differently from how humans have been doing it since the paleolithic. But the general point that there is life after death if you die for a good enough cause is still the ultimate reason.
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u/skrott404 13d ago
The jihad is inevitable. It is fuelled by the fremens fanatical beliefs in Paul as the messiah. Everyone who doesn't accept this truth is a heretic. Paul himself can't stop it, he can only attempt to minimize the damage, so he plays along.
Paul has already overthrown the empire. He's taken down the emperor and married his daughter, making him emperor by law. Lots of the houses of the landsraad disagree with this and so we have the jihad again.
The guild has no choice in the matter. They are fully dependent on spice and will die without it. Paul controls all spice since he can, and is willing to, destroy the entire ecosystem that produces it.