thumb|Depiction of Yakub from [[Dwight York's The Holy Tablets, 1996|upright=1.2|alt=Black and white front-facing drawing of a black man with a bulbous, oversized head.]]
Yakub (also spelled Yacub or Yaqub) is a figure in the mythology of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its offshoots. According to the NOI's doctrine, Yakub was a black Meccan scientist who lived 6,600 years ago and created the white race. According to the story, following his discovery of the law of attraction and repulsion, he gathered followers and began the creation of the white race through a form of selective breeding referred to as "grafting" on the island of Patmos; Yakub died at the age of 150, but his followers continued the process after his death. According to the NOI, the white race was created with an evil nature, and were destined to rule over black people for a period of 6,000 years through the practice of "tricknology," which ended in 1914. Yakub is identified with two biblical figures: the patriarch Jacob and John of Patmos from the Book of Revelation.
The story and idea of Yakub originated in the writings of the NOI's founder Wallace Fard Muhammad. Scholars have variously traced its origins in Fard's thought to the idea of the Yakubites propounded by the Moorish Science Temple or to the historical Battle of Alarcos, or alternatively say it may have been created with little basis in any other tradition. Scholars have argued the tale is an example of a black theodicy, with similarities to Gnosticism with Yakub as the Demiurge, as well as the fall of man. It has also been interpreted as a reversal of the contemporary racist ideas that asserted the inferiority of black people. The NOI's interpretation of the biblical Jacob has been criticized for being antisemitic.
The story has, throughout its history, caused disputes within the NOI. Under its current leader Louis Farrakhan, the NOI continues to assert that the story of Yakub is true, not a metaphor, and has been proven by modern science. The NOI splinter groups known as the Nuwaubian Nation, the United Nation of Islam, and the Five-Percent Nation share a belief in Yakub, though the Nuwaubian Nation teaches a distinct version of the myth. The figure of Yakub is not part of mainstream Islam and has been routinely mocked. The story has influenced popular culture from the 1960s onward, particularly hip-hop. Starting in the mid-2010s, Yakub became the subject of ironic Internet memes.
Summary
Original version
According to the story of Yakub, at the start of human history, a variety of types of black people inhabited the moon; when a black "god-scientist" became frustrated that all those living on the moon did not speak one language, he blew up the moon. A piece of this destroyed moon became the Earth, which was then populated by a community of surviving, morally righteous black people, some of whom settled in the city of Mecca. Yakub was born a short distance outside the city, and was among the third of original black people who were discontented with life in this society. A member of the Meccan branch of the Tribe of Shabazz, Yakub acquired the nickname "big head", because of his unusually large head and arrogance. He connected this to the rules of human attraction: the "unlike" people would attract, manipulate the original "like" people. By the age of 18, he had finished his education and had learned everything that Mecca's universities had to teach him, and was widely known as a successful scientist. He then discovered that the original black man contained both a "black germ" and a "brown germ", with the brown being the recessive one, and believed that if he could separate them by "grafting", he could graft the brown germ into a white germ. This insight led to a plan to create a new people, who, using tricks and lies, could rule the original black man and destroy them. As a group of people distinct from the Original Asiatic Race, the white race are bereft of divinity, being intrinsically prone to lying, violence, and brutality. According to the Nation's teachings, Yakub's newly created white race sowed discord among the black race, and thus were exiled to live in the caves of Europe ("West Asia"). In this narrative, it was in Europe that the white race engaged in bestiality and degenerated, losing everything except their language. They were kept in Europe by guards. According to the Nation, Jesus was also a prophet sent to try and civilize the white race. However, the whites had learned to use "tricknology": a plan to use their trickery and lack of empathy and emotion to usurp power and enslave the black population, bringing the first slaves to America. According to NOI doctrine, Yakub's progeny were destined to rule for 6,000 years before the original black peoples of the world regained dominance, the end of which was the year 1914.
Nuwaubian version
An alternative version of the story was told by the Nuwaubian Nation, a black supremacist new religious movement run by Dwight York: this is set out in a roughly 1,700 page book called The Holy Tablets. In the Nuwaubian telling of the Yakub myth, 17 million years before the first of many "intergalactic battles", the ancestors of black people (given a variety of names, including Riziquians) were gods, but subservient to the "Supreme God". Riziquians lived in another galaxy on a planet known as "Rizk", which was located in the "Original Tri-Solar System" which featured a "moveable throne"/spaceship, Nibiru.
In their telling the original protective atmospheric layer of this planet, necessary to protect from the UV rays of its three suns, had been destroyed by an evil being who was the leader of the fallen angels, Shaitan. Shaitan had been asked by the supreme god to move, either off the planet entirely or to a different location on it. He refused, and instead set off an atomic explosion "like an H-bomb", destroying part of the atmosphere. The scientists of the planet were able to repair it with gold, but there wasn't enough gold on the planet, necessitating excursions into space on the Nibiru to mine gold from planet Earth, where colonies were established. It was developed by his successor Elijah Muhammad in several writings, most fully in a chapter entitled "The Making of Devil" in his book Message to the Blackman in America.
In the Book of Genesis, biblical patriarch Jacob makes a deal with his uncle Laban to divide livestock amongst themselves. The black goats and sheep will belong to Laban, while spotted, speckled or brown goats will belong to Jacob. After Laban agrees, Jacob places wood "with white streaks" in front of the strongest animals during breeding so as to produce spotted offspring. He further uses selective breeding to ensure "the feebler would be Laban's, and the stronger Jacob's". Michael Muhammad Knight opines: "The prominence of Jacob as not only a controller of animal heredity but a selfish, scheming deceiver presents him as a natural candidate for the engineer of the white race".
Ernest Allen argues that "the Yakub myth may have been created out of whole cloth by Prophet Fard".
Knight comments on the story's partial setting in ancient Greece. He notes that "Scientific journals of the day praised systematized infanticide in ancient Greece as crucial for building a nation and advancing civilization. Fard just took the science of his day and flipped it to inspire the oppressed rather than excuse the oppressors. In Fard's science, eugenics in ancient Greece only made a devil who would rape the earth until his time ran out."
Role in the Nation of Islam and its offshoots
alt=1997 photo of Farrakhan, the leader of the NOI. He is staring to the right, away from the camera, and wearing a suit.|thumb|[[Louis Farrakhan, pictured 1997. |upright=.8]]The Yakub story attempts to rationalize "black suffering" through the lens of Islamic theology. Even for those members who refused to take the story literally, it provided a useful metaphor for racial relations and oppression. Elijah Muhammad repeatedly referred to whites as "the devil". The Nation maintains that most white people are unaware of their true origins, but that such knowledge is held by senior white Freemasons.
The doctrine is not present or substantiated in mainstream Islam. As a result, it has led to controversy. In his Autobiography, Malcolm X notes that, in his travels in the Middle East, many Muslims reacted with shock upon hearing about the character of Yakub. When Malcolm founded his own religion organization, Muslim Mosque, Inc., he did not carry over the concept of Yakub.
Louis Farrakhan reinstated the original Nation of Islam, and has reasserted his belief in the literal truth of the story of Yakub. In a 1996 interview, Henry Louis Gates, Chairman of Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department, asked him whether the story was a metaphor or literal. Farrakhan claimed that aspects of the story had been proven accurate by modern genetic science and insisted that "Personally, I believe that Yakub is not a mythical figure—he is a very real scientist. Not a big-head silly thing, as they would like to say". Farrakhan's periodical The Final Call continues to publish articles asserting the truth of the story, arguing that modern science supports the accuracy of Elijah Muhammad's account of Yakub. The Five-Percent Nation and the United Nation of Islam, both of which are NOI splinter groups, also believe in the Yakub doctrine. Five-Percent Nation founder Clarence 13X took the story in an antiracist direction, taking white disciples.
Commentary
Knight writes that the tale of Yakub has been routinely mocked by outsiders, adding that many people will find Fard's stories difficult to take seriously. Nathaniel Deutsch also notes that Fard and Muhammad draw on the concept of the Demiurge, along with traditions of esotericism in biblical interpretation, absorbing aspects of biblical tales to the new narrative, such as the swords of the Muslim warriors keeping the "white devils" from Paradise, like the flaming sword of the angel protecting the Garden of Eden in Genesis.
Edward Curtis calls the story "a black theodicy: a story grounded in a mythological view of history that explained the fall of black civilization, the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas, and the practice of Christian religion among slaves and their descendants". Stephen C. Finley also called it a theodicy. Several commentators state that the story, by associating blacks with ancient high civilizations and whites with cave-dwelling barbarians and gorillas, both uses and spectacularly reverses the populist and scientific racism of the era which identified Africans as primitive, or closer to apes than whites. This drew on earlier criticisms of white supremacist Nordicism, creating a mythic version of "attacks on AngloSaxon lineage and behavior that had been voiced by more mainstream black thinkers during the nineteenth century. [...] With these references the [NOI] Muslims replicated the images of European savagery in the Middle Ages that were so pervasive in nineteenth-century black racial thought". XinLing Li sees a contradiction in the story, where blackness is always good but still capable of evil.
Some have taken the story of Yakub as an allegory. Warith Deen Mohammed took his father Elijah Muhammad's teaching about Yakub and his "white devils" to represent a state of mind. He believes that the meanings of the myth are malleable.
In culture
The American author and playwright Amiri Baraka's play A Black Mass (1965) takes inspiration from the story of Yakub. In Baraka's version, the experiment creates a single Frankenstein-like "white" monster who kills Jacoub and the other magician-scientists and bites a woman, transforming her in a vampiric way into a white-devil mate for himself. From this monstrous couple the white race is descended.
According to Charise L. Cheney, the doctrine of Yakub has had a significant influence in rap culture, mentioning several rappers. She argues that the rapper Kam (a member of the NOI), in his 1995 song "Keep tha Peace", uses the Yakub doctrine in order to explain black-on-black crime and gang violence in American inner cities, noting the lyrics: Chuck D of Public Enemy also refers to the story in his song "Party for Your Right to Fight", referring to the Yakub story by attributing the deaths of African American radicals to the "grafted devils" conspiring against the "Black Asiatic Man".