Yakub (Nation of Islam)

• 1. Introduction

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  Yakub, also spelled Yacub or Yaqub, is the central figure of a creation story told by the Nation of Islam. The Nation's doctrine describes him as a black scientist from Mecca who lived 6,600 years ago and engineered the white race. The story is not part of mainstream Islam. It has been defended, argued over, mocked and remade since the early 1930s. Where did it come from? Why did the Nation insist on it, and why did some of its own members hesitate? And how did a figure with an enormous head travel from a doctrinal pamphlet to hip-hop lyrics and internet memes?

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• 2. The Law Of Magnets

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  Before Yakub, according to the original telling, there was a moon. Black people of many types lived on it, and a black god-scientist grew frustrated that they did not share one language. He blew up the moon, and a piece of it became the Earth. The survivors were morally righteous black people, and some of them settled in the city of Mecca.

  Yakub was born a short distance outside Mecca, as a member of the Meccan branch of the Tribe of Shabazz. He belonged to the third of the original black people who were discontented with life in that society. He earned the nickname "big head" because of his unusually large head and his arrogance.

  At the age of six, he played with steel magnets and discovered the law of attraction and repulsion. He linked it to human beings. Unlike people, he reasoned, would attract and manipulate the original, like people. By eighteen he had learned everything Mecca's universities could teach, and he was widely known as a successful scientist. Then he found that the original black man carried a black germ and a brown germ, with the brown one recessive. If the two could be separated by grafting, he believed, the brown germ could be grafted into a white germ. The goal was a new people who would use tricks and lies to rule the original black man and destroy them.

  Yakub gathered a following and caused trouble, so the Meccan authorities exiled him together with 59,999 followers. They sailed to an isle in the Aegean Sea called Pelan, which Elijah Muhammad identified as modern-day Patmos. There Yakub set up a despotic regime and, in this account, invented Christianity to fool black people and hide their true history. He began breeding the black traits out of his followers. Children who were too dark were killed at birth, and their bodies were fed to wild animals or burned.

  Yakub died at the age of 150, but he had passed his knowledge on, and his followers kept working. After 600 years the white race existed. The other races were by-products. The red race came out of the brown, the yellow out of the red, and the white out of the yellow. The cruelty of that process, the Nation taught, shaped the character of the people it produced.

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• 3. Tricknology And Exile

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  On Patmos, the teaching goes, the breeders lied to the black mothers of the babies, and that lie became part of the nature of the white child. Murder, too, was said to be born into the new race. The Nation described white people as a group separate from the Original Asiatic Race, without divinity and prone to lying, violence and brutality.

  The newly created people sowed discord among the black race and were banished to live in the caves of Europe, which the text calls West Asia. Guards kept them there. In that setting, the story says, they engaged in bestiality and degenerated, losing everything except their language. Elijah Muhammad added a further claim: some of the new whites tried to become black, failed, and turned into gorillas and monkeys.

  To help them develop, the ruling Allah sent prophets. The first was Musa, or Moses, who taught the whites to cook and to wear clothes. He tried to civilize them, then gave up and blew up 300 of the most troublesome with dynamite. In the Nation's account Jesus was also a prophet sent on the same task.

  By then the whites had learned tricknology, a plan to use trickery and a lack of empathy to seize power and enslave the black population. This is how the first slaves were brought to America. The Nation's doctrine gave Yakub's descendants 6,000 years of rule before the original black peoples would regain dominance. That period ended in 1914. A rival telling of the myth moves the whole drama far from Earth.

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• 4. Riziquians And Rizk

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  The Holy Tablets, a book of roughly 1,700 pages, sets out the Nuwaubian version of Yakub. The Nuwaubian Nation is a splinter group run by Dwight York, and its telling begins 17 million years before the first of many intergalactic battles. The ancestors of black people, called Riziquians among other names, were gods who answered to the Supreme God. They lived on a planet called Rizk, in a place named the Original Tri-Solar System, where a movable throne doubled as the spaceship Nibiru.

  Rizk had three suns, and its atmospheric layer protected it from their ultraviolet rays. An evil being named Shaitan, leader of the fallen angels, had been told by the supreme god to move away. He refused and set off an atomic explosion, described as being like an H-bomb, that destroyed part of the atmosphere. The planet's scientists repaired it with gold, but Rizk did not hold enough. So they travelled on Nibiru to mine gold from the planet Earth, and they founded colonies there.

  The Riziquians considered mining beneath their status as angels. They spliced the genes of Homo erectus with their own and produced humankind to do the work. Humans first had psychic abilities. After wars, and after Cain and Abel, the Riziquians removed from the human brain the gland responsible for them.

  In this telling, Yakub was born with two brains. That is the Nuwaubian explanation for his large head, and it made him a genius able to run gene-splicing experiments. Those experiments produced white people. When they were finished, one of his two brains exploded and killed him.

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• 5. Roots Of The Tale

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  Wallace Fard Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, first wrote down the Yakub story in a doctrinal question-and-answer pamphlet, Lost Found Moslem Lesson No. 2, in the early 1930s. His successor Elijah Muhammad developed it in several writings. The fullest version is a chapter called "The Making of Devil" in his book Message to the Blackman in America. In that version, Jews are counted as part of a wider, artificially created white race.

  Scholars disagree about where Fard found it. Ernest Allen argues that the myth may have been made up from nothing by Fard himself. Allen also offers a possible historical echo. In 1195 the Muslim leader Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur defeated the Franks at the Battle of Alarcos. About 40,000 European prisoners were taken to Morocco to labor on his building projects, then freed and allowed to form a settlement between Fez and Marrakesh. On his deathbed, Yaqub reportedly regretted allowing that enclave.

  Yusuf Nuruddin points to a closer source. Timothy Drew's Moorish Science Temple taught about "Yakubites," and Fard may have belonged to it before founding the Nation. Drew said a West African Moor named Yakub had landed on the Yucatán Peninsula. His people, Drew taught, became scientific geniuses with large heads, and Drew's followers cited the Olmec colossal heads as proof.

  Michael Muhammad Knight notes that the story is partly set in ancient Greece. He observes that scientific journals of Fard's day praised systematized infanticide in ancient Greece as crucial to building a nation. Fard, in Knight's view, took the science of his day and flipped it to inspire the oppressed rather than excuse the oppressors.

  The Book of Genesis supplies another thread. Jacob strikes a deal with his uncle Laban over their livestock, with the black animals going to Laban and the spotted, speckled or brown ones to Jacob. Jacob then places streaked wood before the strongest animals as they breed, so that their young are spotted. Knight calls this scheming controller of animal heredity a "natural candidate for the engineer of the white race."

  Malcolm X, in his speeches, identified Yakub fully with Jacob. He recalled Elijah Muhammad saying that the angel Jacob wrestled was not God but the government of the day. Yakub, on this reading, needed funds for his expedition to Patmos, and "angel" was a symbol hiding his real opponent. Malcolm X also said John of Patmos was Yakub, getting ready to make a new race.

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• 6. Doctrine Under Dispute

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  Elijah Muhammad repeatedly called whites "the devil," and the Yakub story supplied the reasoning behind it. It tries to explain black suffering through Islamic theology. Even members who refused to take it literally found it a useful metaphor for race relations and oppression. The Nation also teaches that most white people do not know their true origins, but that senior white Freemasons do.

  Malcolm X described the reaction abroad in his Autobiography. In the Middle East, many Muslims were shocked when he told them about Yakub. When he later founded his own organization, Muslim Mosque, Inc., he did not carry the concept over. Warith Deen Mohammed, Elijah Muhammad's son, took his father's teaching about Yakub and the white devils to describe a state of mind.

  Louis Farrakhan reinstated the original Nation of Islam and reasserted the literal truth of the story. In a 1996 interview, Henry Louis Gates, then chairman of Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department, asked whether it was a metaphor or literal. Farrakhan said aspects of the story had been proven by modern genetic science. He insisted that Yakub was "a very real scientist." Farrakhan's periodical The Final Call still publishes articles arguing that modern science supports Elijah Muhammad's account.

  The Five-Percent Nation and the United Nation of Islam, both Nation of Islam splinter groups, also believe in Yakub. Five-Percent Nation founder Clarence 13X steered the story in an antiracist direction and took white disciples.

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• 7. Scholars Read The Myth

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  Edward Curtis calls the Yakub story "a black theodicy," meaning an account of why suffering exists. In his reading, it explains the fall of black civilization, the Middle Passage and the Christian religion practiced by slaves and their descendants. Stephen C. Finley also labeled it a theodicy. Harold Bloom, in The American Religion, finds a combination of the biblical God and the Gnostic Demiurge. He calls Yakub "a crude but pungent Gnostic Demiurge."

  Nathaniel Deutsch adds that Fard and Muhammad drew on esoteric traditions of biblical interpretation. One example is the swords of Muslim warriors that keep the "white devils" from Paradise, like the flaming sword guarding the Garden of Eden. Nuruddin likewise sets the story beside Genesis. The group opposing the first utopian society resembles the snake in Eden, and Yakub's expulsion resembles the expulsion of Adam and Eve.

  Several commentators see a reversal of the racism of the era. Popular and scientific racism cast Africans as primitive or closer to apes. The Yakub story links black people to ancient high civilizations and whites to cave-dwelling barbarians and gorillas. It also echoes nineteenth-century black thinkers who attacked white supremacist Nordicism. XinLing Li sees a contradiction in the story, since blackness is always good yet still capable of evil.

  Knight calls the tale pseudoscience but stresses that eugenics counted as science in Fard's time. He judges it more scientific than the resurrection of Jesus or the claim that Muhammad rode a flying horse into paradise. For Knight, it helped him reckon with the social construction of race and white privilege. In that sense he considers it "absolutely true," and he believes its meanings are flexible.

  Eunice G. Pollack places the story within the Nation's antisemitism. The Nation holds that black people, not Jews, were God's chosen people, and that Yakub schemed to hand that birthright to "white Jews" he had created. It links this to Jacob taking the birthright from his brother Esau. The Nation promises to free the descendants of Esau from 4,000 years of Jacob's Satanic power. Fredrik deBoer argues that because Yakub's world treats racial antagonism as inherent, it leads naturally to racial separatism.

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• 8. Echoes And Memes

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  Amiri Baraka's 1965 play A Black Mass takes its inspiration from Yakub. His character, renamed Jacoub, is one of three "Black Magicians" who together symbolize the black origin of all religions, according to the critic Melani McAlister. In the play the experiment makes a single Frankenstein-like white monster. It kills Jacoub and the other magician-scientists, then bites a woman and turns her into a vampiric mate. McAlister reads the play as a version of the Faust story, and as a meditation on the role of art.

  Charise L. Cheney traces the doctrine's influence through rap. In 1990, Grand Puba announced a calling to bring black people enlightenment and end white domination, rapping about dropping the bomb on the Yakub crew. Chuck D of Public Enemy, in "Party for Your Right to Fight," blames the deaths of African American radicals on "grafted devils." Kam, a Nation of Islam member, used Yakub in his 1995 song "Keep tha Peace" to explain black-on-black crime and gang violence in American inner cities. In his 2014 freestyle "We Made It," a duet with Jay Electronica, Jay-Z raps about chasing the Yakub back into caves.

  In the mid-2010s, users of 4chan began circulating memes of Yakub with a bulbous head, drawn from Nuwaubian visual art. The figure became part of right-wing meme culture. In 2023 the cartoonist Frank Edward published a graphic novel, Yakub: The Father of the White Devil Race. It follows the Nation's myth faithfully but recasts Yakub as a hero, and Knight credits it with much of the online right's fascination.

  Knight calls white supremacists' interest in the Nation "curious" but long established. American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell attended Nation events, and Wyatt Kaldenberg's encounters with the group led him toward an Aryanist religion. References to Yakub have grown more prominent on Generation Z social media, which confuses older people. Knight cites this new life as an example of "weaponized irony."

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