The most successful method of this total training was the ancient Riddle Game. Its interactive methodology forced the child to reason, not merely memorize, to find the answer. Thousands of riddles went into Fremen training; some examples: Challenge: "Silence?" Answer: "The friend of the hunted." Challenge: "What are two things never to do?" Answer: "Never to forgive, never to forget." Challenge: "What does one take into the desert?" Answer: "Everything that is necessary and nothing else."
The tribal sietch formed the home from which a person reaching maturity moved out into the world. The sietch was essentially a rule of law exemplified by the benevolent personal authority of the Naib. Group action was the norm. All training of the young focused on the life of the sietch and their expected contributions and responsibilities to that life. In the sietch warren schools, the young were trained to make and service stillsuits, rugs, windtraps, stilltents and weapons. They learned how to maintain stolen machines, harvest spice, hunt, use a crysknife, repair a catch-basin, and ride Shai-Hulud.
With the arrival of the planetologist Pardot Kynes, the aspirations and subsequent education of the Fremen began to change. The emphasis still remained on the ancient, time-tested values of purposeful survival training, including the values of tribal unity and water discipline. But Kynes offered the Fremen a dream — that the desert planet might someday be a lush, green, water-rich planet. The entire ecology of Dune might be reversed, according to Kynes, through understanding Dune's ecosystem and then altering it. As is often the penalty for such hubris, the Fremen got exactly what they hoped for, and it destroyed the planet's only real source of wealth, its spice crop, as well as the vitality of Fremen culture.
Kynes started the first formal sietch schools and, as a result, is often referred to as the "Father of the Fremen Education System." This title should not be viewed as an honor, given how matters turned out. In these schools Kynes presented a curriculum that suited the planetologist's ecological ambitions. He taught about trees, grass, rivers, lakes, snow, dune plantings and water conservation. Kynes supported the harsh disciplines of the sietch and the strong authoritarian rule of the Naibs. The "subversion" dreamed of by Kynes and the Fremen of his time was not the political fall of the Harkonnens but the conquest of a hostile, unforgiving desert by the civilizing influence of ecologosocial change. Had Kynes' plan had the time to unfold, perhaps the paradise he envisioned would have emerged. But he could not foresee the changes to be wrought by the Atreides.
The early years of Atreides rule under Paul Muad'Dib were disastrous for the Fremen and their culture, Paul diverted their strength to the fighting of his interstellar religious wars. He taught his Fremen to be soldiers in a virtually endless campaign of conquest in the name of his new religion. Millions died, and the entire Fremen culture turned from tribal survival-orientation to a militaristic, politicized destruction-orientation. Where once sietch schools taught how to make fabrics from spice fiber, Paul's young Fremen learned about interstellar assault tactics in the Arrakeen War College.
The second major destructive change brought about by the revered Paul Atreides was the growth of isolated individualism as a socially accepted value. Sietch discipline was all but forgotten as towns and cities grew. Water resources increased, but people soon became selfish in their approach to life.
In a short fifteen years Paul and Alia were able to bleed the Fremen of their courageous young men and women, while on the home front Atreides policies made Fremen culture soft, dependent, wasteful, and impotent. Paul's Fremen, without whom he would never have become emperor, were being systematically destroyed through an educational policy that cut the youth off from their cultural roots.
The destruction of the Fremen begun by Paul and continued by Alia was completed by Leto II. Leto imposed severely restrictive educational policies throughout his empire. He emphasized learning only the agricultural skills needed in his village-focused pastoral empire. To preserve his empire he cut communications, virtually eliminated travel, and suppressed and eliminated the technical classes in all but the most essential areas, hoping to provide a feudal peace. He was successful, and much accumulated knowledge, such as that stored in the library of the Arrakeen War College, was destroyed. Leto saw no need to preserve that knowledge, and he feared the potential harm it would cause if it should fall into the hands of what he termed the "wicked."
Under Leto's rule some sietches actually returned to the practice of sacrificing virgins, a ritual that appeared in the earliest Fremen days on Dune. But this regression to a semibarbaric past was short-lived. The ultimate result of Leto's policy, when coupled with the ecological reversal occurring on Dune, was to make the Fremen into little more than museum exhibits. The planet grew green, the people grew soft, the villages grew more and more isolated from each other, while enemies grew fewer and less troublesome.
As Fremen survival needs were more easily met, educational needs diminished. Unlike the people of Caladan, who turned to the arts for revitalization, the Fremen people simply began to die. They had known nothing of life except endless struggle. Once that struggle was removed, the Fremen lost their will to live. As the planet grew rich with water, the Fremen people, like the great worms that needed the deep, dry desert to live, began to die quietly, unmourned and virtually forgotten.
In the year 2549 of his reign, Leto declared Fremen an endangered population and ordered his Fish Speakers to move those that still lived to reservations. These reservations later evolved into the "Fremen Museums" which tried to replicate the ancient sietch ways.
P.F.
Further references: FISH SPEAKERS; FREMEN JIHAD; Hwen Urtom, tr., The Little Book of Riddles, Studies in Atreidean History 534 (Paseo: Inst. of Galacto-Fremen Culture).
FREMEN JIHAD
The Last Jihad (S.A. Sumer and N.E. Kautman, 3 vols. [Salusa Secundus: Morgan and Sharak]) one of the oldest works on the Butlerian Jihad, is still one of the best. But the authors were far too competent as historians to believe the title anything more than a statement of hope, as their introduction to this monumental study makes clear. Sadly, as all now know, their hope was in vain. The Fremen jihad, ten thousand years after the Butlerian, was every bit its equal in suffering, destruction, and death.
Through the Journals of Leto II, Paul Muad'Dib's son, we have preserved the reckoning of the father concerning the crusade he led. "Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions..." (Rakis Ref. Cat. 55-A89). A record to put the Butlerian Jihad to shame in volume, if not degree. The grim shade of the Butlerian chief priestess Urania might well remark that her Jihad had not the advantage of so many inhabited planets, of such a number of their fellows. Given this handicap in the number of victims available, the leaders of the Butlerian Jihad could still point with pride to their accomplishments.
Yet, it has been argued, neither of the true leaders of the two Jihads were willing butchers. Jehanne Butler, we are told, argued against the urgings of the priestesses of Komos, and Paul Muad'Dib grieved over the slaughter accomplished by his Fremen. It seems less difficult to believe in Jehanne as a reluctant leader of such a horde as hers. She was but an extraordinary human being, after all, while Paul was a proven Mahdi. How is it possible that such a man as he, prescient and puissant, could be persuaded to such a course against his will? The question had been posed by many since the end of the Fremen Jihad, and ever more frequently since the publication of the archives from Rakis. The answer has generally consisted in an attack upon the question: that is, in a response which holds that such a query shows an ignorance of the limitations within which even such an emperor as a Paul Muad'Dib must operate.
Several forces combined to force Jihad upon him.
The most obvious was the revolt of the Landsraad houses prompted by the overthrow of the House Corrino. The Imperium had survived for ten millennia as a balance of tensions. The struggle between the Imperial H
ouse and the voracious Great Houses — the former striving to survive as the supreme power, the varied latter wishing to end that supremacy — was one of the fundamental tensions of the Imperium. When the Great Houses learned that one of them had finally succeeded, it was only to be expected that the more powerful would take the opportunity to declare their independence from the new Imperium. Believing themselves free of the Sardaukar and unaware of the greater menace of the Fremen, they saw in the events on Arrakis the chance to fulfill a dream of generations.
The Great Houses that rebelled made a disastrous miscalculation. The old Imperium had regarded political ambition as a constant of human nature. Punishments for failed plots had never been intended to wipe out such ambition through severity; rather, whatever harshness had characterized the sanctions for unsuccessful grasps at power had been designed to delay and weaken the next outstretched hand. This is not to make House Corrino a collection of philanthropic philosophers — it is only to see them as realists.
The Sardaukar were the instruments of these realists, and their source. The first emperor had been a Sardaukar, and since then they had followed the Imperial House out of the most intense combination of self-interest and ingrained loyalty. But once the threat of the Sardaukar was removed, any Great House would naturally lunge at the opportunity to declare its own independence, and would in fact think of becoming the Imperial House itself. None of them expected to be annihilated for this. They were acting as their experience of centuries taught them they should, and the House Corrino would not have expected anything else.
But they misunderstood their new opponents. What seemed to the Great Houses to be a matter of politics was, to the Fremen, in the province of religion. The leaders of the Great Houses saw themselves as taking advantage of a moment of political flux; the Fremen saw unbelievers defying their Mahdi.
To the Fremen, rebellion against Paul Muad'Dib was an attack on the Messiah, promised them for thousands of years, and now come. The Fremen followed Paul out of a religious belief buttressed by a desire for vengeance upon the Harkonnens and the Imperium, which had oppressed them from time immemorial — immemorial for all but them. It was their traditions, and then religion, which turned a war to consolidate control of an empire into a Jihad.
The conquest of the system of Malathon, controlled by the Great House of the McNaughts, was the first inkling the universe had that the rules of empire had changed. The McNaughts were one of the most powerful of the old Great Houses, and the family had a tradition of cautious, shrewd leadership, along with a reputation is a dangerous enemy. The McNaught forces were sizeable and well trained, in Landsraad terms; they were supported by three lesser houses from the neighboring system of Kalakh.
The stories spread by the few hundred survivors of the battles for Malathon and Kalakh shocked all who heard them. The forces of the McNaughts and their allies had been obliterated. What made the news border on the incredible was that this had been accomplished with a force of ten Fremen legions — some 300,000 men. The entire armed might of two systems had been wiped out by a force less than one tenth its size. Had the remaining Great Houses but known it, there was more to fear: these victories had been accomplished without the Fedaykin.
At this early stage the Fedaykin were unknown, and the Fremen poorly understood. Rebellion continued, and the Fremen victories spread across the galaxy. As the natives of Arrakis moved from planet to planet and system to system, they encountered many faiths not their own, some involving tenets or rituals as loathsome to them as the discoveries on Richese had been to the Komans. As time, worlds, and lives of millions and then billions passed, the religious motivations of the Fremen came to play an ever greater part in their battles. Slowly, the assurance of a secure throne for their Mahdi came to be joined by the desire for a "purified" empire.
A particular target of this religious culling came to be the faiths dominated by the Bene Gesserit. The order which had trained and attempted to dominate Paul's mother, the order which had striven so long to produce and use the Kwisatz Haderach that Paul was — that order was of special concern to him. Their power and their plans conflicted with his.
The Fremen attitude toward the Bene Gesserit had always been at best ambivalent, and usually fearful and antagonistic. But with the coming of Paul Muad'Dib, their ambivalence was over. They could produce their own Reverend Mothers, as they had for thousands of years; Jessica was all the Bene Gesserit they would ever need, as she had fulfilled the prophecies.
These attitudes on the part of Paul and the Fremen, hardly such as to incline them toward the order, were reinforced by the Bene Gesserit's support of the forces allied against the Fremen. The Bene Gesserit were faced with the prospect of their plans of the past uncounted centuries culminating in a person who was beyond their control, and it was more than they could bear. Rather than have the Kwisatz Haderach live independently of them, they hoped to kill him and produce another. With the help of the Bene Gesserit, the forces of the Landsraad houses that had not yet been defeated met the Fremen legions in the system of Molitor. The presence of the Sardaukar on the side of the Landsraad made the battles a struggle; the Fedaykin made the battles a victory for the Fremen.
This was the greatest campaign in the Jihad but not the last. Many systems remained unpacified, and even more remained outside the power of the burgeoning religion of Muad'Dib. The Qizara Tafwid — the Fremen priesthood — regarded the Jihad as the means of spreading their religion, so that what had begun as a response to rebellion had become a vehicle of conversion. One may be able to tell when rebellion ends, but who can say when all believe? It is worth noting that most of the forty faiths eradicated by the Jihad perished after the campaign in the system of Molitor. The individual legions of Fremen, moving independently through the galaxy, carried on the work of the Jihad long after Paul Muad'Dib had returned to Arrakis.
By the time the last of the Fremen forces had returned to Arrakis, the wars over and the new Imperium begun, there was not a force left in the universe which could stand against the emperor's might. The tensions and balances which characterized the relations between House Corrino and the forces of the Landsraad were gone, never to return. In their place had arisen the sole force of the Emperor Paul Muad'Dib, now the Mahdi for the human race, not just for the Fremen. Where there had been many religions, now there was one; where there had been many armies, now only one mattered; where there had been a balance of powers between several social and political and economic institutions, now there was unity.
The Bene Gesserit survived as an order, but not as a power. The Spacing Guild survived, but only as a pawn of the emperor. The Landsraad was a shell, and CHOAM was dominated by the new emperor to an extent that House Corrino had never considered. What had been the intricate, subtle interplay of forces in exquisite balance that had given the old Imperium life and meaning was gone.
F.M.
FREMEN LANGUAGE, Atreidean Form
The Fremen, the desert-dwelling tribes of Arrakis, remnants of the Zensunni Wanderers, spoke a language which reveals a portion of their troubled history. Fremen legend had it that their original homeworld was Poritrin, third planet of Epsilon Alangue; even if this were not known to be untrue, clues from their language and religion would point to Sol III, Terra, as being an even earlier site of Zensunni occupation, in fact, their original homeland. Some of this evidence is found in the ancient Terran religion, Islam, which beginning around the eleventh millennium B.G. went through several major as well as minor upheavals and revitalizations (see Lors Karden's A History of the Third Islamic Movement [Salusa Secundus: Morgan and Sharak]), exemplified by the mixture of Sunni and Zen mysticisms embodied in the teachings of Maometh (the "Third Muhammed") from which the Zensunni broke away about 1381 B.G., beginning their long route of planetary migrations.
The Fremen language can be traced to the ancient Terran language 'Arabiya, which the linguist 'l-Taalibii believes to have originally been the official tongue of the Islamic faith, an observatio
n supported by the traditional lore of the Sayyadinas (Tracing the Tongues of Man: Vol. IV, The Sinus Sector [Yorba VI: Rose]). The Fremen language differs greatly from the official Galach of the Old Imperium despite their both demonstrating Terran roots. Both were from entirely different linguistic and cultural stocks. That the stock of Galach represented the technologically and economically dominant culture of the time is evidenced by the status of Galach as the standard of the Old Imperium, while the Fremen tongue, up to the time of Paul Muad'Dib, was the tongue of a persecuted people.
Phonology. Fremen retained (or more accurately, recaptured) many of the early Arabic sounds. These include the labials b, f, and m; the dentals t, th (), d, dh (), and n; the sibilants s, z, and sh (š); the affricate j () the velars k and g (which very often can be derived from q or gh (); the uvulars q, kh (x), and gh (); the liquids l and r; the glides w and y; and the laryngeal h. Absent from Fremen are the Arabic emphatic (pharyngealized-velaraized) consonants , , , , plus the pure pharyngeals h and ‘. The glottal stop () has also disappeared. Geminate or doubled consonants are still evident, as are the five vowels of ancient colloquial Arabic — a, e, i, o, u; however, distinctions in vocalic length as a phonological feature have disappeared in Fremen.
Morphology. Most words of Arabic derivation are based on a triconsonantal root, e.g., k-t-b, which, when combined with various patterns of vowels, generates different but semantically related words and parts of speech. Thus, from the root k-t-b are derived kitab (book), katib (writer), katab (he wrote), yiktub (he writes), etc. While the most ancient form of Terran Arabic showed such morphological complexities as grammatical gender, dual and plural numbers in addition to singular, plurals formed by consonant and vowel mutation as well as by suffixes, noun cases, and verbal moods, later Arabic became more simplified morphologically. Fremen continued this trend, drastically reducing the number of verb paradigms, noun declensions, plural forms, and gender agreement rules. This simplification is perhaps due to the large influx of foreign words into the language during the Zensunni migrations, few of which fit the standard triconsonantal root mold. As an increasingly greater number of such words entered the language, new patterns of declension, conjugation, pluralization, etc., primarily in the form of standardized suffixes, superseded the old Arabic consonant/vowel mutation patterns. For example, old Arabic usually formed plurals via any of a number of different mutation patterns, e.g., kitib (book), kutub (books); bib(door), abwib (doors). But Fremen, with the exception of certain isolated archaisms, e.g., ibar (tears) in Kitab al-Ibar, from abra (tear), employs one of three regular suffixes depending on the dialect: -at (from Arabic -it, a feminine plural marker), -an (probably adopted from the Tailara language of Gamma Vertis VII, spoken by other transportees to Beta Tegeuse), or -u (probably the plural marker -uw from the Blue Hill speech of the dilaubite miners of Rima, largest satellite of Altair V; large numbers of these miners worked side-by-side with the Fremen on Rossak). Other simplifications include the loss of the dual, and of gender distinction in adjectives, both disappearing by the end of the Zensunni's long stay on Salusa Secundus, as noted in the ancient grammar written during their stay there by Ibin Manzuur, Qur'aan al-nahw.
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