Yakub (Nation of Islam)

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.

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.

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.

[18] 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.

[19] 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.

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.

[20] 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.

[21] 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.

[25][b] 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".

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".

[21] 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 may have 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.

[29] As a result, it has led to controversy: 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.

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.

[34] 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.

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".

[44] 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.

He also compared his version of the story to Frankenstein, in its conflation of "the six hundred years of Elijah Muhammad's "history" into a single, terrible moment of the creation of a monster.

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 "the roots of black-on-black crime and gang violence in America's inner cities", noting the lyrics:[46] 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]She also notes Grand Puba's 1990 lyric, in which he announces that "his calling was to bring enlightenment to black people and an end to white domination" saying "Here comes the god to send the devil right back to his cave.