The connotations to western audiences carried by Arabic words and imagery in 1965 is vastly different to the connotations conveyed today. It would be incredibly distracting and offputting to modern audiences trying to grasp the core story.
Even if you ignore the rather blunt stereotyping and selective aspects of Islamic cultures that Herbert injected. Or carried over from another story, as was highlighted earlier.
That's not to say the book isn't enjoyable, or even great. It's just that it mashes together various real people and historical incidents and draws much of its power from them. If you know the real story, it's impossible not to notice the parallels. If you remove the parallels, you lose the story's power.
Hydraulic despotism. The pitfalls of manipulating religion. The trap that both present to those who use them. That’s what most of the book is about.
If you just focus on historical analogies you’re missing some major themes of the book. And that’s ignoring the thematic exploration of precognition and omniscience, the ecological themes etc.
1. Colonisation and the relationship of colonisers and colonized.
2. Great leaders and what happens to them (explored further in Messiah and Children, with some really horrible consequences)
3. Environmentalism, feudalism, social stagnation, power structures, mutually assured destruction...
4. Exploration of a society that explicitly rejects thinking machines, in favor of using people as machines.
The proof is the movie version (at least Part I). The fremen feel less like an actual society with a coherent culture because they removed anything that tied them to the Middle Eastern.
I think this is true of fantasy in general, because the progenitor of the modern genre was Tolkien, a huge history/linguistics/mythology nerd. And one can easily argue that he set the precedent of taking history (often the middle ages) and imbuing it with the mythic/religious elements that people told stories about.
Look at GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire. One of the subplots is basically, "What if Chinggis Khan was a chump who died but he had a blonde child bride that accomplished all the shit that he did in real life." Again, I don't think that makes his books bad, but in my experience, the more you study history, the more you realize how the real creativity of fantasy writers is what pieces of history and mythology they crib and recombine.
I've just seen the second film, and I think it does many of the book's messages justice (Great Man in particular). Perhaps you can criticize that removing the window dressing has destroyed some of the setting's cohesion. It's a reasonable argument.
But I do think that the film would lose more if was buttressed with an allegorical context for, uh, more recent world history.
Quick test: if the original didn't include them, would you notice and say "this story really lacks Arabic words to be great"? If not, it wasn't ever necessary.
also, i find the idea that arabic, one of the world's five most spoken languages, has shock value, to be shocking. we aren't talking about a conlang invented by the manson family
Moreover, distracting and off putting to whom? This article, in part, is responding to how distracting it is for fans of the books and readers to see the source material changed in a pretty crucial way. As others have said, its not exactly obvious to me that the use of these words and language are even possible to separate from the core story.
I get that this is a film executive's decision looking at the commercial viability of their product if they whitewash the story (or not), but at the end of the day we can't really say what the commercial success would (or wouldn't) have been if this language were preserved. To me this demonstrates more the entrenchment of the people who are in the position to make these choices rather than what audiences are willing to consume.
After all, consider the fact that Dune has remained important enough, despite the claim that Arabic (and specifically Muslim) imagery is used throughout that someone decided to greenlight two feature film adaptations so far.