Not many science fiction readers know that traditional themes in genre novels such as invisible men, time travel, alien flying machines, and even interstellar and planetary travel are similar to elements in popular tales from medieval Islamic times such as The Thousand and One Nights.

In his article for the Australian magazine Aeon, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmed, an academic in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington and a data scientist and artificial intelligence scientist, wrote that speculative fiction is often linked with European romance and read as a response to the Industrial Revolution.

But thinking about imaginative technologies, imagining ideal social arrangements, and drawing the blurry boundaries between mind, machine and animal, is not the preserve of the West alone.

By the early 20th century, the writer says, "reflective imagination" appeared in the Islamic world as a form of resistance to Western colonial forces. For example, Muhammadu Bello Kajara, a Nigerian author who writes in the language of the Hausa tribes, wrote Januki in 1934, a novel It is set in alternative West Africa, where indigenous peoples are engaged in a struggle against British colonialism, but in a world inhabited by elves and other creatures.

In the following decades, when the great Western empires began to collapse, the theme (theme) of political utopia was often addressed with irony. For example, the novel "The Elixir of Life" by Moroccan writer Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi was about the discovery of an elixir that grants immortality, but instead of being a reason for For society to prevail in hope and happiness, it caused class divisions, riots and the disintegration of the social fabric.

The writer narrates the transformations of science fiction literature in the Islamic world in the twentieth century, stopping at the novel of the Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi "Frankenstein in Baghdad", which discusses the war and sectarian violence in Iraq from the angle of a fictional monster collected from different parts of the bodies of victims of war and violence.

Anthology

Aurangzeb Ahmed released the "Islam and Science Fiction" series, a selection of short stories from science fiction literature that he compiled because he did not see adequate representation of Muslims in science fiction.

In the introduction to his book, Ahmed writes that he started the Islam and Science Fiction Project in 2005, and the main motive behind the project was to fill a gap in the literature on Muslims and Islamic cultures in science fiction.

Thus the focus is on Muslim-majority cultures and not necessarily on the religion itself, although there is an overlap between the two, and the anthology included about 78 contributions from Muslim and non-Muslim writers in the first volume.

The first volume of the series "Islam and Science Fiction" includes 78 posts (Al-Jazeera)

“The field of Islamic science fiction did not reach maturity until more than 150 years after the emergence of science fiction from the Islamic world and more than a decade after the start of the Islam and Science Fiction Project,” Ahmed wrote. In the early years of this project, I co-edited an anthology of fiction Scientific "A mosque between the stars" with Canadian science fiction author Ahmed Khan in 2008".

And the technical website gizmodo quoted Ahmed as saying that most of the stories discuss traditional science fiction tropes (such as time travel or alien invasions) through an Islamic lens, but others have been specifically inspired by Islamic culture, such as the story “The Calligraphy.” Alex Criss with which Ahmed started his book.

Ahmed says that Islam is represented in both traditional and modern science fiction, for example, the novel and movie "Dune" carry a lot of themes and terminology from Islamic culture, and Ahmed said that the reason is partly because Muslim countries have a wide range of fairy tales. and myths that resonate in science fiction, such as The Thousand and One Nights.

This representation is also due to the contribution of Islamic civilization to the scientific community. When Europe was in the era of the Middle Ages, Islamic civilization was in a golden age for scientific and mathematical discoveries, from the elephant clock (invented by the scientist and engineer Badi Al-Zaman Al-Jazari 1136-1206 AD) to the dark cabin of the optician Ibn Al-Haytham , where Islamic civilization brought many technological marvels to the modern world.

Muslim scholars have also translated thousands of additional texts in science, medicine and mathematics, and this dedication to science, technology and world building has also inspired many works of fiction that are part of the roots of science fiction, according to the author.

While Frankenstein by English author Mary Shelley is considered the first work of real science fiction in the opinion of critics, there are many books - some by Muslim authors - that bear many characteristics that distinguish science fiction, and among these novels "A True History" by Lucian of Samosata, It is a novel from the second century AD about a man traveling to the moon through a water tap and encounters strange creatures, and there is also the story of Hayy bin Yaqzan by Ibn Tufail in the 12th century AD.

literature mask

Arabic literature has known science fiction from an early age, but modern works have been predominantly entertaining and educational, and not literature that deals with contemporary social reality and is subjected to criticism and analysis.

Science fiction literature is globally linked to political and social criticism, and George Wells's early novels - such as "The Time Machine" - contained political projections often opposed to power, while the novel "The Locations of the Planets in the Chronicles of Telemac", which was translated by Rifa'a al-Tahtawi from French in the mid-19th century, included scathing criticism. For King Louis XIV.

In his book "Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Islamic World", Jürg Matthias Dettermann, an academic at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, sees Muslim-majority countries and countries ruled by authoritarian regimes that have produced very great fictional novels belonging to biology. Astronomer or search for extraterrestrial life.

The book discusses how scientists from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search for extraterrestrial life, and argues that Islamic traditions have generally been supportive of concepts of extraterrestrial life (such as belief in the existence of jinn), according to a previous report by Al Jazeera Net.

In this engaging book, the author surveys Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish and Urdu texts and films, showing how scholars and artists in Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of exciting research.

He concludes that repression has helped science fiction more than harm, as censorship has encouraged authors to conceal criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times and on distant planets.