Bryan Appleyard,The Singularity And The Butlerian Jihad

During my youth back in the last century having read Tolkiens Lord Of The Rings,looking around for something similar  I took the advice of a friend and tackled Frank Herberts  Dune.The novel is set in a future galactic civilization some eight thousand years in the future.It is a feudal religious future with an Islamic element from which machine intelligence has been deliberately banished.One of their religious commandments states thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the mind of a man.There is frequent mention in the book of something called the Butlerian Jihad by which AI was banished from the culture.I swiftly spotted that this must be something named after Samuel Butlers Erewhon.Since then there has been some confusion on this point . In something called The Dune Encyclopedia  it is stated that the Jihad was named after a woman called Jehan Butler.This Encyclopedia was not written by Frank Herbert and has since been declared non canonical by his estate.I suspect this was an example of dumbing down for a science fiction fan boy audience who would be presumed to read nothing but science fiction and certainly not 19th century novelists like Butler.Frank Herbert was an extremely erudite man with his knowledge of ecology and religion so I think we can asume the Butlerian Jihad is named after Samuel  Butler.In his novel Erewhon  the hero stumbles across a lost civilization in a remote part of New Zealand.The civilization is on a medieval level but was once extremely mechanised until a philosopher produced The Book of The Machines  to which I alluded earlier.There then occurred a civil war between a mechanist party and a anti- mechanist.party.The anti-mechanist party eventually triumphed because they developed better machines of war than their opponents.That  is the essence of the Butlerian Jihad.