This sort of summarizes the article. The author is apparently unaware that Frank Herbert had wide and varied interests and did an enormous amount of research for the books.
I don't know how true that was in the USA but certainly Europe has had more than a thousand years of intimate contacts with the arab world, which is not mysterious at all.
How familiar do you think most of Europe would be with tenth century Islamic theology? It's not mysterious, but it also isn't well known either.
An idea which is totally true...
>I don't know how true that was in the USA but certainly Europe has had more than a thousand years of intimate contacts with the arab world, which is not mysterious at all.
And yet, the knowledge of it, for the vast majority (even if they have Ph.Ds on unrelated topics) is superficial at best. You'd be lucky if they know Avicenna, Omar Khayyam (funnily, both Persian muslims) or the Moors...
(Well, in the US that's also true for all kinds of world cultures, with the exception of Japanese anime-related culture).
Maybe the same reason we know have people poo-pooing the modern computer age -- moore's law for decades, the modern software stack, the internet, etc. -- as not amazing innovation. And down playing the role all of that has played in everything else humans now do from satellite systems to sequencing the genome. They think that because their interactions with computers are mostly mindless that modern computing must have been no great feat to build.