There are so many things wrong with this analysis that I'm not sure where to begin. First, Dune is so patently *not* inspired by the fall of Roman Empire - Herbert calls it The Galactic Padishah Empire for a reason. It's not subtle. Not everything in history is Rome, Tom.
https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/1315289038522286080
The idea that early Muslims would have understood the "fall of Rome" is equally anachronistic. The early Arabs experienced the Roman empire as a continuous & living entity: what we call (equally anachronistically) Byzantium, they called Rome, al-Rūm. hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
And not only did they view the Eastern Roman Empire as a living entity, it was a vibrant source of inspiration: influencing art, scholarship, and knowledge production in the early Islamic period. halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-0081740…
The idea that "Rome fell", bringing a dark period of decline in the middle ages, is really so outmoded. This idea, as I know @holland_tom knows, tells us more about the construction of the past in 19th c. Europe than about the actual past. Not everything is Gibbon, Tom.
For a corrective to this view, read @akarjooravary's piece in al-Jazeera today, which, ironically, @holland_tom is retweeting while seemingly missing the point.
https://twitter.com/akarjooravary/status/1315278434998910977
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