Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert.
Profound and strange enough to allow one to see reality reflected in it. Not so strange that one can't recognize the reality, either.
One could wish Herbert hadn't chosen "Jihad", but one recognizes it as merely a vehicle which fit the setting and purpose, not a commentary on that specific religion.
This sequel is as good as Dune.
"I was enjoying the silence," Scytale said. "Our hostilities are better left unvoiced." (p. 14)
"It requires only the slightest shift in emphasis, a glissade of the emotions, to transform envy into enmity," Scytale said. (p. 27)
He felt that some element of himself lay immersed in frosty hoar-darkness without end. His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind. He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that this universe still eluded him. (p. 81, emphasis mine)
And so it is with all human power.
Here lies a toppled god-
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one. (p. 141)
"You can't stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. It's overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a thing? Muad'dib hasn't the antidote. The thing has roots in chaos. Can orders reach there?" (p. 187)
No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals. (p. 209)
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