I understand scifi to be critically important. It does two things. It creates an alternative fantasy world to that created by the religion, of itself very important by actually stating there is more than one way to understand the world, and playing with ideas about what might other worlds and cultures be like.
Ursula le Guin is an important example.
Always Coming Home is a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin published in 1985. This novel is about a cultural group of humans—the Kesh—who "might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California." (p. i) Part novel, part textbook, part anthropologist's record, Always Coming Home explains the life and culture of the Kesh people.[1]
The book weaves around the story of a Kesh woman called Stone Telling, who lived for years with her father's people—the Dayao or Condor people, whose society is rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical and militarily expansionist. The story fills less than a third of the book, with the rest being a mixture of Kesh cultural lore (including poetry, prose of various kinds, mythos, rituals, and recipes), essays on Kesh culture, and the musings of the narrator, "Pandora".
Some editions of the book were accompanied by a tape of Kesh music and poetry.
Pandora describes the book as a protest against contemporary civilization, which the Kesh call "the Sickness of Man". Pandora muses that one key difference is that the Kesh have solved the problem of overpopulation—there are many fewer of them than there are of us. They use such inventions of civilization as writing, steel, guns, electricity, trains, and a computer network (see below). However, unlike most neighboring societies, they reject government, a non-laboring caste, expansion of population or territory, disbelief in what we consider supernatural, and human domination of the natural environment. They blend millennia of human economic culture by combining aspects of hunter-gatherer, agriculture, and industry, but reject cities; indeed, what they call towns would count as villages now.
[edit]Literary significance and criticism
It has been noted that Always Coming Home underscores Le Guin's long-standing anthropological interests. The Valley of Na is modeled on the landscape of California's Napa Valley, where Ursula Le Guin grew up as a child.[2]
Like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American and Taoist themes.[citation needed] It is set in a time so post-apocalyptic that no cultural source can remember the apocalypse, though a few folk tales refer to our time. The only signs of our civilisation that have lasted into their time are artifacts such as styrofoam and a self-manufacturing, self-maintaining, solar-system-wide computer network.
Stone Telling's narrative may be seen as a return to the theme of The Dispossessed and The Eye of the Heron, in which a person from an anarchistic society visits an acquisitive government-ruled society and returns.[citation needed]
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The second vector is science - actually discussing science and technology and showing other possibilities.
Maybe some Islamic Scifi?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home
Topic: Islam and Science Fiction