Dune 2 and Hollywood's commodification of Muslimness

There are many things that I have seen in Israel’s genocide in Gaza that I will never be able to unsee.

Biscuits pressed into limp hands. White sheets wrapped around derelict bodies. Ice cream trucks made into morgues. Sleeping children who will never wake up. Prayer garments worn by women to bed in case they are killed or awoken by someone pulling them out of the rubble that was once their home.

Perhaps that’s why I was so unsettled, and angered, by Hollywood actor Anya Taylor-Joy’s appropriation of a white hijab that so hauntingly resembles these prayer garments worn by Gaza women at the premier for Dune 2 this week.

I have become used to seeing these garments all over my social media feed, worn by traumatised mothers as they wail, the bloodied corpses of their children in their arms. Adorned by women seen as collateral damage to a West intent on their slaughter and occupation rather than a celebrity on a glitzy red carpet.

"There is something beyond sinister about Taylor-Joy being complimented on her timeless, subtle elegance while the same attire has become emblematic of a genocide waged upon a civilian population"

There is something beyond sinister about Taylor-Joy being complimented on her timeless, subtle elegance while the same attire has become emblematic of a genocide waged upon a civilian population.

This simple, modest, run of the mill item found in most Muslim women’s homes becomes something else entirely when draped on the body of a wealthy, famous white woman.

When Muslim women wear it, it is archaic and backwards, criminalised and curbed, an excuse to ‘civilise’ and ‘liberate’ them. But on Taylor-Joy, it’s edgy and alternative, graceful and refined. 

The comparative silence from those who have praised Taylor-Joy while drawing a blank on the plight of the women of Gaza further entrenches the notion that we are only worthy of the Western liberal feminist gaze when we are either being consumed or saved; when it fits the imperialist agenda.

Media outlets who have lauded Taylor-Joy’s “bride-like” ethereal look, the Instagram comments complimenting her timeless style and her fellow celebrities who posed beside her hijab-covered form have mostly been deafeningly silent on the plight of the women of Gaza.

When Dune comes out in cinemas tomorrow, it's bound to be a Hollywood blockbuster.

But what about the (unaddressed) issue around the lack of Arab representation, given the story's influences?

Here's @HannaFlint with her film review 👇#DuneMovie #Dunehttps://t.co/ExLEFz44ad

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) October 20, 2021

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.

Like the hijab on an A-list celebrity, knitted into a balaclava on the head of some influencer or donned by the modest glamour icons of old paired with a slimline cigarette and dramatic cat eyeliner.

It is not our garments, our languages, our customs that is the issue. It is us and our Muslimness itself that deserves extermination so that the spoils can be enjoyed by the West, free of guilt and celebrated for its diversity.

"If Palestinians were not largely Muslim, if they were not Arab - if the women didn’t dress precisely the way that Anya Taylor-Joy gets to dress - then this genocide would have moved the world"

The problems with Dune go beyond its hollow cosplaying of Muslimness, though. It relies upon Hollywood’s favourite trope of the superior white saviour (in this case, Timothy Chalamet AKA Paul Atreides) civilising the barbaric Arabs (the Fremen).

It is symptomatic of a wider problem in the film industry, which primes the public to dehumanise Arabs and Muslims to the end aim of legitimising our slaughter. If every other blockbuster film centres around a backwards Arab being modernised by an altruistic white guy or bombed into liberation by a Western state, then we normalise that happening in real life - which, incidentally, it already is. 

If that wasn’t distasteful enough, the timing of this release of Dune 2, now while a genocide wages on in its fifth month, smacks of a flagrant tactlessness that I can’t overlook.

Consider some of the language used by Israeli officials in recent months: that this is a war between “children of light” and “children of darkness”, a war against “human animals”. It is clear that this genocide is not only politically but also racially and religiously motivated.

In fact, the Western world is enabling Israel’s war on Gaza precisely because Israel is the West’s last colonial outpost, a rotten beacon of blood-soaked democracy in an apparently backwards Arab and Muslim world.

If Palestinians were not largely Muslim, if they were not Arab - if the women didn’t dress precisely the way that Anya Taylor-Joy gets to dress - then this genocide would have moved the world in the same way that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did.

We are socialised to swallow the massacre of Arabs and Muslims as commonplace and inconsequential. Our corpses become mere collateral damage to a world unperturbed by our slaughter.

Dune glamorises, commodifies and colonises the very aesthetics that Muslims are currently being persecuted for in Gaza, and peddles the myth that the Arab needs saving by the white man.

For its cast to then glamorise and sexualise our prayer garments on the red carpet is demonstrative of something much larger than a two hour film.

The success - indeed, the very existence - of both the book and now film series is testament to the West’s desire to consume our Muslim aesthetics in a fantasy realm whilst disenfranchising us in the real world - be it through securitisation or racism, war or genocide.

Dune reminds us of the place that the Arab and Muslim will perpetually inhabit in the West. It tells us: we will feed on your exoticness, adopt the intricacies of your culture, ravage your homelands, all whilst removing you from the equation altogether.

Nadeine Asbali is a secondary school teacher in London.

Follow her on Twitter: @najourno

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Opinions expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of their employer, or of The New Arab and its editorial board or staff.