The Butlerian Jihad is an event in the back-story of Frank Herbert's fictional Dune universe. Occurring over 10,000 years before the events chronicled in his 1965 novel Dune, this jihad leads to the outlawing of certain technologies, primarily "thinking machines", a collective term for computers and artificial intelligence of any kind. This prohibition is a key influence on the nature of Herbert's fictional setting.
Herbert may have coined the name from 19th-century author Samuel Butler, who has the citizens of Erewhon enact a prohibition on machines newer than 270 years fearing that "it was the race of the intelligent machines and not the race of men which would be the next step in evolution.".
In the post-Herbert Dune canon, the immediate cause of the Jihad is the abortion of the healthy fetus of a Bene Gesserit, Jehanne Butler, by an AI.
Read more about Butlerian Jihad: The Original Dune Series, The Dune Encyclopedia, Legends of Dune