Dreaming the Ummah

This premise bears similarities to Isaac Asimov’s classic 1956 novel The Minority Report (adapted to a 2002 film by Steven Spielberg) and the Japanese anime series Psycho Pass.

Salman Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonisation and World Order (Hurst, 2014), 90.

Ibid, 93.

A reader may ask, quite fairly, why I do not trade “Islamic” science fiction for “Islamicate,” given that Marshall Hodgson’s influential coinage would seem to achieve my goal of conveying Islam as a social and civilizational phenomenon, rather than a doctrinal or legal one. One reason is that I share Shahab Ahmed’s critique of “Islamicate” as reinscribing a Protestant-like “fundamentalism of piety” that reduces Islam proper to scripture and casts its cultural and civilizational emanations as somehow less “Islamic,” or at best “Islam-ish.” The other obvious alternative, which is “Muslim,” runs into the same conceptual hurdles. “Muslim” sci-fi would seem to indicate a text that is either authored by a Muslim or features explicitly Muslim characters, neither of which is a relevant distinction for my purposes. Likewise, to speak of “Muslim futurism” would too literally shift the focus to what Muslims do and think, in an anthropological sense, rather than the reinterpretation of “Islam” itself, even by non-Muslims, as an aesthetic and political project of the future—its translation into a narrative frame, politico-technological imaginary, and societal order. To be fair, one can also read “Muslim” as “Muslimness,” a term which has been used to describe the presence of Muslim ideas in art which otherwise neither centers Islam nor comes from Muslim minds. Haris Durrani, for instance, has quite convincingly argued for the profound “Muslimness” of Dune, owing to its “serious engagement” with Muslim ideas, histories, and practices on the level of plotting, theming, and worldbuilding; indeed, “it is through, and not apart from, the engagement with Islam and Muslims that the Dune novels explore their central themes about the relationship between religion, ecology, technology, capitalism, and anti/colonialism.” I agree with Durrani, but I do not perceive a significant difference between “Muslimness” and “Islamicate”— both are deliberately “squishy” terms that perform the same function of abstracting Islam as an aesthetic or culture from Islam as a bounded scriptural tradition of dogmas, laws, and rituals. It is the same move made by art historians who distinguish between art by Muslims (Muslim art) and explicitly devotional art (Islamic art), for instance.

Haris Durrani, “The Muslimness of Dune: A Close Reading of ‘Appendix II: The Religion of Dune,’” Reactor, February 26, 2024, reactormag.com.

Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate, 83.

The final form of history as a discipline is psychohistory, the science-turned-oracle-turned-religion of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction series Foundation.

Ahmed Elbenni, “Paradise Is Monotonous,” Yale Daily News, May 20, 2019, yaledailynews.com.

I owe this reference to my friend and colleague Mathias Ghyoot.

Will Collins, “The Secret History of Dune,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 16, 2017, lareviewofbooks.org.

“Haris Durrani on Muslimness, Orientalism, and Imperialism in Dune,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 24 (1) 2023, 78-85.

For an overview of the Orientalist aesthetics of the original Star Wars trilogy (1977-1983), from the Tusken Raiders to Jabba the Hutt, see Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2015), 245-247. Beyond Star Wars, the American science-fiction television series, Babylon 5 (1994), features a few alien species, namely the Minbari and the Narn, which in some respects evoke Islam and Muslims.

Hebron is an autonomous political entity, maintaining relations with the Hegemony but operating outside its jurisdiction.

We are told that “firing squads had been busy day and night settling ancient theological disputes and it was estimated that at least a quarter of a million Sunnis had been slaughtered in the first two days of the New Prophet’s occupation.”

Dan Simmons, Hyperion (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 136-137.

Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion (London: Doubleday, 1990), 481-483.

See Dan Simmons, Endymion (Headline Book Publishing, 1996) and The Rise of Endymion (Bantam Books, 1997)

We also learn that Terran diplomats and sheikhs from the Islamic Confederation of Quebec, Kingdom of Iowa, and Texas Dependency maintain friendly relations with the Martian Emirate.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (Bentam Spectra, 1992). Mars is at one point described as “the pan-Arab dream come alive,” given the contribution of financial and human capital by “all the Arab nations,” including “Syrians and Iraqis, Egyptians and Saudis, Gulf Staters and Palestinians, Libyans and Bedouins.” Regardless of national or class background, “here among the foreigners they were all cousins.” This solidarity is reinforced by the suspicion that the colonists’ Western leaders, while preaching the formation of “an indigenous Martian culture,” in fact only intend to promote some “Terran cultures” at the expense of others, in “a form of Ataturkism.”

Somewhat surprisingly, the main innovation of post-9/11 sci-fi is the expansion of the Muslim future beyond the Arab world, arguably for the first time since Persian Muslims visited Nhu York. Pitch Black / The Chronicles of Riddick (2000 / 2004) gives us Black Muslims five hundred years in the future, when New Mecca is the capital of the planet Helion Prime. Orson Scott Card’s Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant (2002/2005) moves Muslims further east, as years after Ender’s Game, Ender’s friend Alai is elected caliph of the “Muslim nations” and successfully takes India, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia back from China. However, external and internal challenges to his rule eventually force Alai to flee Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson, too, revisited the Muslim future, in a manner of speaking, almost immediately after 9/11, with The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). What would have happened if the Black Death had not killed a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century, but all of it, effectively eliminating Christianity from the world stage? A Muslim repopulation of Europe, according to Robinson. By 1915, the eve of the “Long War,” the world has split into four blocs: the Chinese Empire, the Tranvancori League (southern India and southern Africa), and the Hodenosaunee League (most of North America). Dar al-Islam now includes the American East Coast, most of South America, most of Africa, Arabia, all of Europe, central Asia, and Russia (in this timeline, neither Malaysia nor Indonesia are Muslim). The Muslim world unites in a war against the other three blocs. After 67 years of fighting, the Muslim bloc loses the war. This leads to the founding of the League of All Nations and the end of the imperial age. Going into the 21st century, the main geopolitical tensions in the world continue to be between Dar al-Islam and China, with a split between more liberal-Sufi and conservative Muslim nations.

Her cousin Resit is the starship’s lawyer and a devout Muslim as well, except that she does not veil her face. The two pray their five daily prayers together.

One noteworthy exception to this norm is the protagonist of Ted Chiang’s classic novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (2007), which follows a fabric merchant in Baghdad named Fuwaad ibn Abbas. He is essentially a Muslim everyman, and the narrative takes his faith for granted. The novelette itself is a time-travel tale set in the medieval past and narrated as a frame story evocative of The Thousand and One Nights.

Recall that the protagonist of The Mechanical Sky, Abdul-Hamid Jones, is a mawla, a half-Arab, estranged from the purely Arab Martians, and only when the Emir’s Grand Vizier, Rubenstein, introduces Jones to the pleasures of Beethoven does he remember his lost Western “heritage.”

Its three installments are God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture.

Though it no longer does, Umayma also used to accept alien refugees so long as they were from among the “People of the Book.” This accounts for minority communities with their own marginal religious beliefs and practices: “The Mhorians had been the last allowed refuge on Umayma, nearly a thousand years before. They had brought with them dangerous idols and belief in a foreign prophet, but they claimed to be people of the Book, and custom required that they be given sanctuary.”

As Hurley writes, “Words, even the words of the prayer language, were open to interpretation, and when Nasheen had disbanded the Caliphate and instituted a monarchy, existing divisions in those interpretations had reached a violent head… Chenjans would submit only to God, not His Prophet, let alone any monarch who wanted to sever God and government. That final insult had resulted in an explosion of all the rest, and the world had split in two.” See God’s War (Night Shade Publishing, 2011), 78.

Hurley’s narrative follows dual protagonists typifying the sensibilities of their societies. Rhys, the Chenjan, is a pious man, always reading “the Kitab,” reciting the ninety-nine names of God, objecting to mixed-gender prayer, and refusing drinking or premarital sex.# Nyx, the Nasheenian, is about as liberal as her people, but unlike most, she is an atheist, a hardboiled assassin who believes in nothing beyond self-interest. Much of what’s interesting about The Bel Dame Apocrypha comes from its delight in pairing dissonant cultural and political signifiers, delinking them from their conventional associations and keeping the reader from too easily mapping the Chenja-Nasheen allegory onto the Sunni-Shi’i split, or any other intra-Muslim divide. Nasheen is a matriarchal society (all men are sent to the warfront) ruled by “God’s Imam,” Queen Zaynab, who also happens to be a despot who holds sham elections. Unlike Chenja, Nasheen does not forbid images, and many public spaces display mosaics of the Nasheenian female rulers meeting and receiving guidance from the Prophet (his face is kept veiled).

It is they who reveal the survival of Muslims on other planets.

Another example of Hurley’s historicist approach is her treatment of Arabic. The language of Chenja’s public life is not the vernacular but the “prayer language” i.e. Arabic—never once referenced by name, as its original name has been forgotten. Most Chenjans (and some Nasheenians) can read the script of the prayer language, but very few outside the mullahs know how to speak it (for this reason, it’s restricted to ritual and liturgical purposes). This all makes for an interesting contrast with Zettel’s approach in Fool’s War, where no indication is given of Arabic changing as a language centuries into a spacefaring future.

In Red Mars, Robinson includes a tariqa of Sufi scientists less interested in pan-Arabism than their Muslim brethren. One of the major European characters, Frank, registers the Sufis’ singular hospitality and ecumenical open-mindedness, as compared to the other Arabs. Robinson returns to Sufism again in The Years of Salt and Rice, where it is suggested as a more moderate and tolerant strain of Islam compared to its more extremist wing.

From the preceding survey of Anglo-American Islamic science-fiction, I have omitted at least one major work: British author Garry Kilworth’s The Night of Kadar (1978). This is an obscure but significant text, and it will receive a detailed treatment in the second part of this article as a striking dramatization of the challenges facing any Islamofuturist project.

Of course, truly great sci-fi authors have also come from beyond the Anglosphere—Stanislaw Lem was Polish, while Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were Russian (and just two authors in a rich Russian and Soviet tradition of science fiction).

See Jörg Matthias Determann, Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World (I.B. Tauris, 2021), as well as Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland & Company, 2022). The latter is an edited volume of interviews and critical essays which provides a useful overview of the genre’s growth in various Muslim countries, including Algeria, Syria, Morocco, Kuwait, Yemen, India, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Bosnia, and Indonesia.

Al-Farābī’s al-Madīna al-Fadīla is the paradigmatic example.

Ian Campbell, Arabic Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2018), 8.

Just as it is no coincidence that the most ardent believers in the science fictions of our day, from UFOs to AGI to the Singularity, tend to be atheist or agnostic.

See Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, Mysticism in the Age of Information (Harmony Books, 1998); see also Frank McConnell, The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science: Collected Essays on Storytelling and the Gnostic Imagination (McFarland & Company, 2009).

See Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Or, in the affectionate parody of genre fans, that sensawunda.

Ahmed Elbenni, “Christopher Nolan’s Haunted Humanism,” Marginalia Review of Books, Dec. 17, 2021, marginaliareviewofbooks.com.

Lara Harb, Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 262.

Al-Qazwini cites Q50:6 as part of his formulation of nazar (looking) as a speculative act. His definition of ‘ajab draws on Aristotelian epistemology and is part of a broader Islamic philosophical (falsafa) and theological (kalam) tradition of following Aristotle in identifying wonder (as a state of astonished ignorance) with the beginning of philosophy. “This tradition of linking ‘ajab and ta‘ajjub with the search for the reason behind a given phenomenon continues well past al-Qazwini with such later writers as al-Jurjani (d. 816/ 1413) and al-Suyuti (d. 911/1505).” See Travis Zadeh, “The Wiles of Creation: Philosophy, Fiction, and the ʿAjāʾib Tradition.” Middle Eastern Literatures 13, no. 1 (2010): 21–48.

We should also note that the fascination with the uncanny, fantastic, and marvelous Other was historically the province of romances (in the classical sense) in both the Arabo-Islamic and European literary traditions, and that the romance is widely recognized as a progenitor of science fiction.

Michael Cooperson, “Remembering the Future: Arabic Time-Travel Literature,” Edebiyat (1998).

Robert Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term,” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 1 (1983): 4-69, doi.org.

Jamil Khader, “‘The End’: Anti-normalisation, Islamofuturism and the Erasure of Palestine,” Middle East Monitor, May 15, 2020, middleeastmonitor.com.

Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, for example, was a literary heavyweight and a pioneer of sci-fi in the Arab-Muslim world, but he had little interest in foregrounding specifically Muslim or ummatic futures.

In Elzembely’s The Planet of the Viruses: The First Dialogue with a Microscopic Civilization (2001), for example, viruses from the planet S 60 arrive as refugees on Earth. After establishing contact with the scientist Salah al-Din, they convince the Union of Muslim States to send the starship al-Qadisiyah to liberate their planet from its oppressors.

His pen name is Faisal Tehrani.

Their main spaceship has ninety-nine sections, corresponding to the number of God’s names.

The science fiction novels typically recognized as the very first are American: either Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895).. One of the oldest, if not the oldest, sci-fi television series of all time is British (Doctor Who). George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, both British men, wrote some of the most famous science fiction novels of all time.

See Ausma Zehanat Khan, Uzma Jalaluddin, S.K. Ali, Samira Ahmed, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Sara Jafari, and Soniah Kamal.

See S.A. Chakraborty, Saladin Ahmed, Hafsah Faizal, Karuna Riazi, and though not apparently Muslim himself, P. Djèlí Clark.

See Mohsin Hamid, Leila Aboulela, and G. Willow Wilson. Wilson’s Alif the Unseen (2012) merits special mention as a novel that straddles the line between sci-fi and fantasy, smashing together contemporary politics, quantum computing, and medieval mythology.

Nazim’s story is set in a futuristic Istanbul during the twenty-third century, complete with skyscrapers and electric tramways. In his now-alternate history, a union of African and Asian states forms after the Ottoman defeats in the Balkan Wars.

Authors like Ted Chiang and Andy Weir have achieved widespread name recognition, and several of their works have received film adaptations. Sci-fi television since the 1990s has scored several classics: The X-Files (1993), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993), Babylon 5 (1994), Farscape (1999), Firefly (2002), Battlestar Galactica (2004), LOST (2004), Black Mirror (2011), Rick & Morty (2013), The Expanse (2015), Westworld (2016), Dark (2017), and most recently, Severance (2021), the crowning jewel of Apple’s sustained investment in science fiction—certainly more than any other major player in the American culture industry. Other notable sci-fi series produced by Apple include Foundation (very loosely adapted from Isaac Asimov’s monumental work of the same name), Silo, Dark Matter, and For All Mankind (an alternative history in which the space race against the Soviet Union didn’t end, and continued through to the human settlement of Mars). In Hollywood, meanwhile, only superstar auteur directors have managed to produce sci-fi films with real box office success and mainstream cultural cache. I’m thinking especially of Christopher Nolan (Inception, Interstellar, Tenet), Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, Dune), James Cameron (Terminator, Avatar), and Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation).

The 2017 film Blade Runner 2049 is a sequel to the 1982 Blade Runner, itself adapted from Isaac Asimov’s 1986 classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Think mecha anime especially, such as the Gundam and Evangelion franchises. Rather tellingly, even mecha anime has been on a steep decline for decades, far from its late twentieth century peak. Meanwhile, nothing comparable to the prescient insight of Serial Experiments Lain (1998) or Paranoia Agent (2004) has aired in recent times, nor even quality old-school sci-fi like Planetes (2003).

The term was coined by David Noble. He did not mean it as a metaphor—his argument is that for a time the “religion of technology” was as real and influential a religion as Christianity or Islam. See L. M. Sacasas, “Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology: Or, How to Make Sense of Techno-optimist Manifestos, the Open Ai/Altman Affair, EA/E-acc Movements, and the General Sense of Cultural Stagnation,” The Convivial Society (blog), February 23, 2024, theconvivialsociety.substack.com.

For a fascinating account of this shift and radical right-wing attempts to reverse it, see Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, The Political Aesthetics of ISIS and Italian Futurism (Lexington Books, 2018). Botz-Bornstein contends that groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda are the heirs of the Italian Futurists, and that indeed this may be true to a lesser extent of all the major Islamist movements of the 20th century. I will address some of these ideas in the sequel to this essay.

David Tomas, “The technophilic body: On technicity in William Gibson’s cyborg culture,” New Formations 8 (1989): 113-129.

Effinger’s trilogy is set near the end of the 22nd century, when the West has fractured into feuding states and is in terminal decline, while the Arabo-Muslim world is on the rise. Our protagonist is a Maghrebi man named Audran, the son of an Algerian prostitute and Frenchman. He operates in a seedy and crime-infested Levantine ghetto called Budayeen. He is in a relationship with a trans woman and prostitute. Unlike most people, Audran refuses to surgically alter his body, take mind-altering drugs, or electronically rewire his brain.

Grimwood’s trilogy explores an alternative history in which the First World War never escaped the Balkans. Now, in the twenty-first century, a liberalized Ottoman Empire still rules. Raf, a genetically enhanced detective, lives in Ottoman Alexandria. Across the trilogy, he investigates an escalating series of murders, all involving important political personalities.

Altered Carbon was adapted to a Netflix live-action series in 2018, which featured a Muslim character as a Bay City (future San Francisco) detective in the twenty-fourth century.

Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso Books, 2005), 68.

A “far future fantasy” is a story that would typically belong to the fantasy genre simply relocated in time to the future—something like Star Wars. A “fantasy of the far future” is a genuine attempt to extrapolate the future from the present, in all its radical alterity.

Ahmed Elbenni, “Pixar, Nietzsche, and the End of LARP,” Muftah Magazine, July 17, 2025, muftah.org.

Kyle Chan, “In the Future China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant,” The New York Times, May 19, 2025, nytimes.com

Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg, “The New Space Race With China,” Palladium Magazine, April 2, 2025, palladiummag.com.

Tasha Robinson, “Kim Stanley Robinson Interview: Can Science Fiction Save Us?,” Polygon, October 20, 2020, polygon.com.

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, “Prospects of the Metamodern,” Muftah Magazine, May 16, 2024, muftah.org.

Hijabi Mentat, Muslim Futurism (blog), July 5, 2022. muslimfuturism450264352.wordpress.com. See also “Home,” Islamic Futurism (blog). n.d. islamicfuturism.com. For scholarship on increasing Muslim interest in futurism, see Sara Bolghiran, and Maurits Berger. “Muslim(s), Future(s), Europe: A Cautious Exploration”, Journal of Muslims in Europe 13, 3 (2024): 257-272, doi: doi.org.

Of course, the British-Pakistani scholar Ziauddin Sardar has been writing about Islamic futurology for decades, and just this year was appointed director of the newly-founded International Institute of Futures Studies (IIFS) at the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). I will engage Sardar’s ideas in the sequel to this article.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009).

Qur’an, 2:11-12.

Richard Lea, “Science Fiction: The Realism of the 21st Century,” The Guardian, February 22, 2018, theguardian.com. See also John Plotz, “The Realism of Our Times: Kim Stanley Robinson on How Science Fiction Works,” Public Books, September 23, 2020, publicbooks.org.

Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel is yet another vindication of the superior realism of science fiction; it captures the reality of our moment far better than the reams of contemporary Muslim romances saturating the market.

Josh Taylor, “AI Chatbots Are Becoming Popular Alternatives to Therapy. But They May Worsen Mental Health Crises, Experts Warn,” The Guardian, August 3, 2025, theguardian.com. See also Jaron Lanier, “Your A.I. Lover Will Change You,” The New Yorker, March 22, 2025, newyorker.com; and Michael Kwet, “How US Big Tech Supports Israel’s AI-powered Genocide and Apartheid,” Al Jazeera, May 12, 2024, aljazeera.com

Alexander Beiner, “Get Ready for AI Religions: Sam Altman, Transhumanism and the Merge,” Kainos (blog), October 2, 2024, beiner.substack.com.

William Banks, “Marc Andreessen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ Is Just Old-School Reactionary Elitism,” Jacobin, January 9, 2024, jacobin.com.

Kyle Chayka, “Elon Musk, and How Techno-Fascism Has Come to America,” The New Yorker, February 26, 2025, newyorker.com.

For Robert Heinlein, see Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; for Ayn Rand, see Atlas Shrugged (adapted into a trilogy of films between 2011 and 2014). Libertarianism is distinctive as a political movement for self-consciously locating its origins in science fiction. To the extent that “libertarian fiction” is a discrete literary genre, it is almost entirely science fiction; every year, the Libertarian Futurist Society honors the best libertarian science fiction with the Prometheus Award. The award’s creator, Lester Neil Smith, is both a science fiction author and member of the Libertarian Party.

Travis M. Andrews and Roxanne Roberts, “The Love Affair Between Jeff Bezos and ‘Star Trek,’” October 13, 2021, washingtonpost.com.

Tobias Carroll, “Elon Musk Just Doesn’t Understand the Sci-Fi Visions of Iain M. Banks,” Literary Hub, May 19, 2025, lithub.com. Elon Musk’s sci-fi inspirations don’t stop there—his Neurolink is inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and the Grok feature on X.com takes its name from Martian slang in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Kara Swisher, “Sway Interview: He Conceived of the Metaverse in the ‘90s. He’s Unimpressed with Mark Zuckerberg’s,” The New York Times, Dec. 13, 2021. nytimes.com

Delphi Carstens, “‘Hyperstition: An Introduction,” 0rphan Drift Archive. January 25, 2020. orphandriftarchive.com.

Charles Stross, “Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew up on Real,” Scientific American, March 10, 2025, scientificamerican.com.

These questions are also explored in Fool’s War, Pitch Black, and the Ender’s Game series.

Ahmed Elbenni, “Who Believes in Gulf Futurism?” E-International Relations, April 29, 2025. e-ir.info.

In Hosam Elzembely’s The Half-Humans (2001), for example, the Union of Muslim States (modeled on the European Union) has helped terraform Mars and Venus, and is now leading the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, where hybrid, half-human creatures are discovered.

Ahmed Elbenni, “The Islamic Uncertainty Principle,” Thinkbites. February 7, 2021. thinkbites.org.

Anas ibn Mālik reported: A man said, “O Messenger of Allah, should I tie my camel and trust in Allah, or should I leave her untied and trust in Allah?” The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Tie her and trust in Allah.” See Sunan al-Tirmidhī, no. 2517.

Houellebecq and Simmons are both predated by Thomas Kratman. I refer the reader to the following summary of Caliphate (2008), found on the book jacket, and proceed without further comment: “In the 22nd century European deathbed demographics have turned the continent over to the more fertile Moslems….Such Christians as remain are relegated to dhimmitude, a form of second class citizenship. They are denied arms, denied civil rights, denied a voice, and specially taxed via the Koranic yizya. Their sons are taken as conscripted soldiers while their daughters are subject to the depredations of the continent’s new masters. In that world, Petra, a German girl sold into prostitution as a slave at the age of nine to pay her family’s yizya, dreams of escape. Unlike most girls of the day, Petra can read. And in her only real possession, her grandmother’s diary, a diary detailing the fall of European civilization, Petra has learned of a magic place across the sea: America. But it will take more than magic to free Petra and Europe from their bonds; it will take guns, superior technology, and a reborn spirit of freedom.”

Dan Simmons, Worlds Enough and Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction (EOS, 2002), 133. A short story in this collection, titled “The Ninth of Av” in reference to the Jewish day of mourning Tisha B’Av, follows the 9,114 “old-style” humans remaining on Earth post-apocalypse (as opposed to the millions of posthumans, all female, which inhabit floating orbital rings in Earth’s skies). All old-style humans are descended from Jews. The rare gene that protected their Jewish ancestors from “rubicon,” the virus that devastated humanity, also rendered them sterile. In other words, the old-style humans are the last Jews ever, already without a future even before the story’s final twist. “What was the name of the Jews’ enemy?” one character asks at one point. “Their enemies were legion,” replies another, but Arabs and Nazis are singled out for special mention. “Ninth of Av” concludes in Jerusalem (where the Dome of the Rock and Masjid al-Aqsa have long been rubble), with the implied slaughter of all the old-style humans: “The sound, when it came, was not an actual noise—certainly not speech or sound as Pinchas or Petra had ever encountered it—but more a modulated rumble that moved through their bodies and echoed in their skulls via some terrible bone conduction…the noise struck Petra and Pinchas to their knees, their hands covering their ears in a useless attempt to block out the roaring words, on their knees and screaming in pain…. ‘Itbah al-Yahud!’” (This is supposed to be Arabic for “Kill the Jews!”). It is a quintessential work of Judeopessimism. The duopoly of Ilium/Olympos grew out of this short story.

Shaul Magid, “Judeopessimism: Antisemitism, History, and Critical Race Theory,” Harvard Theological Review 117, no. 2 (2024): 368–90. doi.org.

I am referencing a well-known Prophetic hadith with a special resonance in the era of the Anthropocene: “Even if the Resurrection were established upon one of you while he has in his hand a sapling, let him plant it.” See Musnad Aḥmad, no. 12902.

How challenging, no, that the latter has proven more prescient than the former? We today inhabit the era of what Eric Davis calls the “pharmacological self.” The dominant metaphor of online life, which is to say life, is the pill. We’re Neo in The Matrix, except that we’re not simply choosing between the white and red pill; the pharmacological buffet grows by the day, such that we now have our choice of blue pills, red pills, black pills, white pills, and whatever other versions of soma are still to make their debut in the marketplace of ideologies.

From this angle, we can also identify ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Kawākibī’s Umm al-Qura (1900), a fictionalized proposal for an annual ummatic convention in Mecca, as a very early work of Islamic science fiction.

Campbell, Arabic Science Fiction, 86-87.

Grayson Clary, “Why Are There so Many Catholics in Science Fiction?,” The Atlantic, November 10, 2015, theatlantic.com.

Ahmed Elbenni, “Who Believes in Gulf Futurism?” E-International Relations, April 29, 2025, e-ir.info.

See Aroosa Kanwal and Asma Mansoor, “Pakistani Speculative Fiction: Origins, Contestations, Horizons.” International Review of Social Sciences 9 no. 3 (2021): 244-251.

As recorded in a well-known Prophetic tradition: “Islam began as something strange and will go back to being strange—so glad tidings to the strangers [ghurabāʾ].” See Sunan Ibn Majah 3986.