Yakub (Nation of Islam)



Yakub (sometimes spelled Yacub or Yaqub) is a figure in the mythology of the Nation of Islam (NOI). According to the NOI's doctrine, Yakub was a black scientist who lived 6,600 years ago and began the creation of the white race through a form of selective breeding, referred to as "grafting", while he was living on the island of Patmos.

The story has, throughout its history, caused disputes within the NOI. The story was originated in the writings of the NOI's founder Wallace Fard Muhammad, but was rejected by some of its later leaders. Under its current leader Louis Farrakhan, the NOI continues to assert that the story of Yakub is true.

Summary
The story of Yakub originated in the writings of Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, in his doctrinal Q&A pamphlet Lost Found Moslem Lesson No. 2 from the early 1930s. 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.

Original version
According to the story, 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. At the age of six, he discovered the law of attraction and repulsion by playing with magnets made of steel.

This insight led to a plan to create a new people. He "saw an unlike human being, made to attract others, who could, with the knowledge of tricks and lies, rule the original black man". By the age of 18, he had exhausted all knowledge in the universities of Mecca. He then discovered that the original black man contained both a "black germ" and a "brown germ". With 59,999 followers, he went to an "isle in the Aegean Sea called Pelan", which Muhammad identified as modern-day Patmos. Once there, he established a despotic regime, starting to breed out the black traits of his followers, killing all darker babies, and succeeded in creating a brown race after 200 years.

Yakub died at the age of 150, but his followers carried on his work. After 600 years of this deliberate eugenics system, the white race was created. The brutal conditions of their creation determined the evil nature of the new race: "by lying to the black mother of the baby, this lie was born into the very nature of the white baby; and, murder for the black people was also born in them—or made by nature a liar and murderer". All the races other than the black race were by-products of Yakub's (spelled Yacub in the biography) work, as the "red, yellow and brown" races were created during the "bleaching" process; however, the "black race" included Asian peoples, considered to be shared ancestors of the Moors. "Whites" were defined as Europeans. Elijah Muhammad also asserted that some of the new white race "tried to graft themselves back into the black nation, but they had nothing to go by". As a result, they became gorillas: "A few were lucky enough to make a start, and got as far as what you call the gorilla. In fact, all of the monkey family are from this 2,000 year history of the white race in Europe".

The new race traveled to Mecca, where they caused so much trouble they were exiled to "West Asia (Europe), and stripped of everything but the language. [...] Once there, they were roped in, to keep them out of Paradise. [...] The soldiers patrolled the border armed with swords, to prevent the devils from crossing". For many centuries they lived a barbaric life, surviving naked in caves and eating raw meat, but were eventually drawn out of the caves by Moses who "taught them to wear clothes". Moses tried to civilize them, but eventually gave up and blew up 300 of the most troublesome white people with dynamite.

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 Malachi 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, meaning "providers" — 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.

The Riziquians did not want to mine gold, believing it was beneath their status as angels. They spliced genes of Homo erectus with their own genomes, producing mankind to do it for them. Humans originally had various psychic abilities, but after wars and Cain and Abel, the gland responsible for these psychic powers was removed from the human brain by the Riziquians. Yakub was born with two brains (the Nuwaubian explanation for the size of his large head), making him a genius capable of gene-splicing experiments, which resulted in white people. After his experiments were finished, one of his brains exploded, resulting in his death.

Role in the Nation of Islam
The doctrine of Yakub was one of the reasons for splits in the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X in his Autobiography notes that, in his travels in the Middle East, many Muslims reacted with shock upon hearing about the doctrine of Yakub, which, while present in NOI theology, does not appear in mainstream Islam. He rejected the story in his later statements, asserting that anyone of any race who intentionally deprives others of basic human rights is a "devil". Warith Deen Mohammed, who took over the Nation of Islam after his father Elijah's death, rejected it almost immediately and tried to re-invent the Nation as a mainstream Sunni Islam movement.

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 NOI splinter groups the Five-Percent Nation and the United Nation of Islam also believe in the Yakub doctrine.

Origins of the story
The name Ya'qub (Yakub) is the Arabic variant of the name of the Biblical Patriarch known as Jacob in English language versions of the Bible, and as in Biblical Hebrew. Fard Muhammad's Yakub has some parallels to the Biblical Jacob's role as the father of the tribes of Israel. The idea that Jews were an "artificial race" created by interbreeding and dependent on "tricks and lies" already existed in antisemitic theories of the time. The story of Yakub includes Jews as part of a wider artificially created "white" race.

In speeches by Malcolm X, Yakub is identified completely with Jacob. Referring to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, Malcolm X states that Elijah Muhammad told him that "Jacob was Yacub, and the angel that Jacob wrestled with wasn't God, it was the government of the day". This was because Yakub was seeking funds for his expedition to Patmos, "so when it says Jacob wrestled with an angel, 'angel' is only used as a symbol to hide the one he was really wrestling with". However, Malcolm X also states that John of Patmos was also Yakub, and that the Book of Revelation refers to his deeds: "John was Yacub. John was out there getting ready to make a new race, he said, for the word of the Lord".

Ernest Allen argues that "the Yakub myth may have been created out of whole cloth by Prophet Fard". Allen says the Yakub story could conceivably have been influenced by a real historical event during the struggle between Muslims and Christians for control of Spain. Muslim leader Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur defeated the Franks at the Battle of Alarcos (1195). After the battle, 40,000 European prisoners of war were taken to Morocco to labor on Yaqub's building projects. They were then set free and "allowed to form a valley settlement located somewhere between Fez and Marrakesh. On his deathbed Ya'qub lamented his decision to allow these Shibanis (as they came to be called) to form an enclave on Moroccan soil, thereby posing a potential threat to the stability of the Moorish empire".

Yusuf Nuruddin says that a more direct source was the doctrine of the "Yacobites" or "Yakubites" propounded by Timothy Drew's Moorish Science Temple, to which Fard had probably belonged before he founded the NOI. According to Drew, early pre-Columbian civilizations were founded by a West African Moor "named Yakub who landed on the Yucatan peninsula", whose people evolved into "a race of scientific geniuses with large heads". Drew's followers said this was supported by the large heads of the Olmec statues, which they claimed reflected African features; Nuruddin argues this indicated that the Yakub myth was influenced by the Moorish Science Temple's theology.

Commentary
Harold Bloom in his book The American Religion argues that Yakub combines elements of the biblical God and the Gnostic concept of the Demiurge, saying that "Yakub has an irksome memorability as a crude but pungent Gnostic Demiurge". 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. Yusuf Nuruddin also compared the Yakub story to the Genesis story, with the opposing group to the initial utopian society being comparable to the snake in the Garden of Eden. In his view the story of the later expulsion of Yakub was comparable to the expulsion of Adam and Eve, as well as the fall of man.

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".

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".

In popular culture
The American author and playwright Amiri Baraka's play A Black Mass (1965) takes inspiration from the story of Yakub. According to critic Melani McAlister, "the character of Yakub, now called Jacoub, is introduced as one of three 'Black Magicians' who together symbolize the black origin of all religions". McAlister argues that "Baraka turns the Nation's myth into a reinterpretation of the Faust story and a simultaneous meditation on the role and function of art. As with Faust, Jacoub's individualism and egotism are his undoing, but his failings also signal the destruction of a community. Baraka's version of the story also draws on the Frankenstein tale; he conflates the six hundred years of Elijah Muhammad's 'history' into a single, terrible moment of the creation of a monster." 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 vampire-like 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, referring to raps by Kam and Grand Puba.

"This pseudoscientific theory of racial formation was embraced by rap nationalists like former Ice Cube protégé Kam in his 1995 song 'Keep tha Peace.' A self-proclaimed member of the Nation, Kam presented organizational doctrine as a way to explain the roots of black-on-black crime and gang violence in America's inner cities: 'I'm really not knowin' who to blame or fault / for this tension / I mention this gump / Yakub's cavey / the blue-eyed punk / playin' both sides against each other / now that's the real mutha[fucka].' [...] In 1990 Grand Puba of Brand Nubian announced that his calling was to bring enlightenment to black people and an end to white domination. [...] 'Here comes the god to send the devil right back to his cave. […] We're gonna drop the bomb on the Yakub crew'."

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".