The Jihad Was Not Against the Machines

The sentence appears early in Dune: "thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." Almost everyone reads it as a technological prohibition, as if Frank Herbert had imagined a hippie future without computers. It is a comfortable and rather lazy reading. What the Butlerian commandment forbids is not the machine. It is abdication. The Jihad, according to the texts, does not destroy…