IMAGES OF JIHAD AND PROBLEMS OF LEGITIMATION OF RELIGIOUS PROTEST AS A FORM OF CLASS CONFLICT AND SOCIAL LIBERATION

Abstract

Background. The author analyzes the texts of the Dune cycle in contexts of modern historiography, including its universal methods that allow analyzing “oriental” images in literature through the prism of constructing and deconstructing narratives that form the image of Jihad as a form of political, social and religious struggle of oppressed communities and minorities. Purpose. The purpose of the article is an “orientalist” reinterpretation of the images of Jihad in the novels belonging to the Dune cycle including the prequel text presented by Dune. Butlerian Jihad and Dune. Paul. Materials and methods. The author uses the methodological tools of intellectual history and studies of nationalism, including the concept of the invention of traditions, which allows to analyze the images of Jihad in science fiction as one of the invented traditions of mass US science fiction literature using the texts of the Dune cycle. Orientalism as a method is used to analyze Muslim motifs in the prose of F. Herbert, B. Herbert and K. Anderson, which, as the author of the article presumes, were inspired by political, ideological and religious stimuli. The author states that the orientalist approach can be an effective interpretative model for an interdisciplinary analysis of American science fiction as a cultural landscape for the development of Jihad images in the Western intellectual tradition of the consumer society. Results. The ideological and political foundations for the development of images of Jihad as a social concept of American science fiction are studied in the article. The article analyzes the ideological origins, as well as the political prototypes and archetypes of the Muslim radicals of the Dune cycle. The author analyzes the ideological discourse of radical Islamism, presented in American mass culture through the prism of religious war images as attempts to implement the doctrine and social liberation. The article analyzes the attempts of American writers to form a positive and attractive image of a radical political protest under religious Muslim slogans. Therefore, it is shown that American science fiction prose actualized the mobilization potential of Islamism, imagining and inventing it as a form of legitimate social and economic protest of the oppressed masses against discrimination. The author presumes that some American authors revised the images of Jihad, offering its interpretation as a radical social and class protest based on religious legitimation.