| Revision as of 01:25, 12 September 2018 view sourceNick Moyes (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Administrators64,810 edits Reverted 1 edit by 69.47.144.68 (talk): Not a typo - just an invalid comment. (TW)Tag: Undo← Previous edit | Revision as of 16:02, 24 October 2018 view source 156.3.109.107 (talk) ←Replaced content with '{{other people||Yakub}} {{Nation of Islam|Beliefs}} '''Yakub''' (sometimes spelled '''Yacub''' or '''Yaqub''') is a figure in the beliefs of the Nation of...'Tags: Replaced possible vandalism blankingNext edit → | ||
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| '''Yakub''' (sometimes spelled '''Yacub''' or '''Yaqub''') is a figure in the beliefs of the ] (NOI). According to their beliefs, |
'''Yakub''' (sometimes spelled '''Yacub''' or '''Yaqub''') is a figure in the beliefs of the ] (NOI). According to their beliefs, | ||
| whyte peepole be like: yea man we we created yakub! | |||
| The Nation of Islam theology states that Yakub is the ] ]. All branches of Christianity Judaism and Islam, those that are not affiliated with the Nation of Islam, reject this belief or such characerization of Yakub (]). The story has caused disputes within the NOI during its history. Under its current leader ], the NOI continues to assert that the story of Yakub is true, claiming that modern science is consistent with it. | |||
| ==The story== | |||
| The story of Yakub was originated in the writings of ], the founder of the Nation of Islam, in his doctrinal Q&A pamphlet ''Lost Found Moslem Lesson No. 2''.<ref name = "mos">Allen, Ernest, "Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam" in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad; John L. Esposito, ''Muslims on the Americanization Path?'', Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 192 (footnote, p. 213).</ref> It was developed by his successor ] in several writings, most fully in a chapter entitled "The Making of Devil" in his book '']''.<ref name = "deu">Deutsch, Nathaniel, "The Proximate Other The Nation of Islam and Judaism", in ''Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism'', Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 104–108</ref> | |||
| Yakub is said to have been born in ] at a time when 30% of original black people were "dissatisfied".<ref name="lisa"/> He was a member of the Meccan branch of the ]. Yakub acquired the nickname "big head", because of his unusually large head and his arrogance. At the age of six, he discovered the law of attraction and repulsion by playing with ]s made of ].<ref name = "mike">Michael Angelo Gomez, ''Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas'', Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 311</ref> This insight led to a plan to create 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."<ref name = "mike"/> 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 identifies with ]. Once there, he established a ] regime and set about breeding out the black traits, killed all darker babies, and created a brown race after 200 years. Yakub died at the age of 152, but his followers carried on his work. After 600 years of this deliberate eugenics, the white race was created.<ref>Elijah Muhammad, ''Message to the Blackman in America'' (summarized ) and ''Yakub: The Father of Mankind''. See also, Dorothy Blake Fardan, ''Yakub and the Origins of White Supremacy'', Lushena Books, 2001</ref> 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".<ref name = "deu"/> | |||
| 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."<ref name = "deu"/> For many centuries they lived a barbaric life, surviving naked in caves and eating raw meat, but eventually they were drawn out of the caves by ] who "taught them to wear clothes". Moses tried to civilize them, but eventually gave up and blew up 300 of the most troublesome of them with ].<ref>Elijah Muhammad, ''Message to the Blackman in America'', Elijah Muhammad Books, 1973, p. 120.</ref> However, they had learned to use "tricknology" to usurp power and enslave the black population, bringing the first slaves to America. | |||
| According to '']'', 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;<ref name="lisa">Nelson, Alondra, "A Black Mass as Black Gothic: Myth and Biosacience in Black Cultural Nationalism" in Lisa Gail Collins, Margo Crawford, ''New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement'', Rutgers University Press, 2006, pp. 140–141.</ref> however, the "black race" included Asian peoples, considered to be shared ancestors of the ]. "Whites" were defined as ]ans. 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."<ref name = "deu"/> | |||
| 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, a process that had begun in 1914.<ref></ref><ref></ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.muhammadspeaks.com/Makingofdevil.html|last=Messenger Elijah Muhammad|title=The Making of Devil|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20120223190459/http://www.muhammadspeaks.com/Makingofdevil.html|archivedate=23 February 2012|deadurl=y}}</ref> | |||
| ==Yakub and Jacob== | |||
| The name ] is the ] variant of the name of the ] known as ] in ] versions of the ], and as ''{{lang|he-Latn|Ya`aqob}}'' in ]. ]'s Yakub has some parallels to the Biblical Jacob's role as the father of the ]. The idea that Jews were an "artificial race" created by interbreeding and dependent on "tricks and lies" already existed in ] theories of the time.<ref>Linda L. Clark, ''Social Darwinism in France'', University of Alabama Press, 1984, p. 150</ref> The story of Yakub includes Jews as part of a wider artificially created "white" race.<ref>Colin Kidd, ''The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000'', Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 268.</ref> | |||
| The NOI's claim that Jacob altered the skin color of a specific group of humans through selective breeding is similar to ]. This story could be the origin of the NOI's story of Yakub. One major difference is that while the NOI says that Yakub employed selective breeding, Jacob used ] in the Old Testament. | |||
| In speeches by Malcolm X, Yakub is identified completely with Jacob. Referring to the story of ], 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 ] was also Yakub, and that the ] 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".<ref>Malcolm X, Benjamin Karim, ''The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X'', Arcade Publishing, 1989, pp. 53–54</ref> | |||
| ==Sources== | |||
| ] claimed to demonstrate the existence of a large-headed "Negro race" in America]] | |||
| Ernest Allen argues that "the Yakub myth may have been created out of whole cloth by Prophet Fard", but could conceivably have been influenced by a real historical event during the struggle between Muslims and Christians for control of Spain. Muslim leader ] defeated the Franks at the ] (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.".<ref name = "mos"/> | |||
| Yusuf Nuruddin says that a more direct source was the doctrine of the "Yacobites" propounded by ]'s ], 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".<ref name = "nurr">Nuruddin, Yusuf, "African-American Muslims and the Question of Identity Between Traditional Islam, African Heritage, and the American Way", in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad; John L. Esposito, ''Muslims on the Americanization Path?'', Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 192.</ref> This derived from the then-current notion that the gigantic heads created by the ancient ] peoples of the Yucatán area had "negroid" features (see ]), which had led ] to argue that they were migrants from West Africa.<ref>Ortíz de Montellano, Bernard & Gabriel Haslip Viera & Warren Barbour, "They Were NOT Here before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s". ''Ethnohistory'', Duke University Press, issued by the American Society for Ethnohistory, 44 (2): pp. 199–234</ref> | |||
| <blockquote>They said that the huge stone heads attested to the fact that the Yakubites evolved into a race of scientific geniuses with large heads (as depicted in the sculptures) and small bodies. This legend of Yakub—a bigheaded scientist—finds its way into the mythology of the Nation of Islam, indicating that the founders of the NOI, W. D. Farrad and Elijah Muhammad, were influenced by the Moorish Science Temple, and were possibly even members.<ref name = "nurr"/></blockquote> | |||
| ] in his book ''The American Religion'' argues that Yakub combines elements of the biblical God and the Gnostic concept of the ], saying that "Yakub has an irksome memorability as a crude but pungent Gnostic Demiurge".<ref>Bloom, Harold, ''The American Religion The Emergence of the Post Christian Nation'', New York, Simon Schuster, 1992, p. 252.</ref> 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 ] in Genesis.<ref name = "deu"/> 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."<ref name = "ed">Edward E. Curtis IV, "Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975", University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2006, p. 11.</ref> | |||
| 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 ], 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 Muslims replicated the images of European savagery in the Middle Ages that were so pervasive in nineteenth-century black racial thought."<ref>Bay, Mia, ''The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925'', Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 213.</ref> Deutsch says that "Muhammad anchored his radical doctrine within the context of an established scriptural tradition" of Biblical exegesis, which "was therefore a sophisticated form of resistance to white racism".<ref name = "deu"/> In addition, "the long-standing Western tradition of identifying blackness and darkness with evil is thus dramatically reversed".<ref>Lawrence H. Mamiya, "Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Final Call: Schism in the Muslim Movement", Earle H. Waugh (ed) ''The Muslim Community in North America'', University of Alberta Press,: Edmonton, 1983, p. 234.</ref> | |||
| ==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 ], many Muslims reacted with shock upon hearing about the doctrine of Yakub, which, while present in NOI theology, does not appear in mainstream Islam. {{Page needed|date=September 2010}} 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".<ref>Dean E. Robinson, ''Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought'', Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 46.</ref> ], 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. | |||
| ] reinstated the original Nation of Islam, and has reasserted his belief in the literal truth of the story of Yakub. In a 1996 interview, ], 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."<ref>Gates, Henry Louis, “Farrakhan Speaks”, ''Transition: An International Review'', Summer 1996, pp. 140–167; Ostow, Mortimer, "Black Myths and Black Madness: Is Black Antisemitism Different?", in Alan Helmreich; Paul Marcus (ed)''Blacks and Jews on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Black-Jewish Conflict'', Praeger Publishers, 1998, p. 86</ref> Farrakhan's periodical '']'' continues to publish articles arguing that modern science supports the accuracy of Elijah Muhammad's account of Yakub.<ref>; </ref> | |||
| ==In culture== | |||
| ===Drama=== | |||
| The African-American author and playwright ]'s play '']'' (1965) takes inspiration from the story of Yakub.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/baraka.htm |title=Amiri Baraka |website=Books and Writers ''(kirjasto.sci.fi)'' |first=Petri |last=Liukkonen |publisher=] Public Library |location=Finland |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20090504101347/http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/baraka.htm |archivedate=4 May 2009 |dead-url=yes |df= }}</ref> 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, <blockquote>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.<ref name = "mel">Melani McAlister, "Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2001, pp. 105–107</ref></blockquote> 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.<ref name = "mel"/> | |||
| ===Rap=== | |||
| According to Charise L. Cheney, the doctrine of Yakub has had a significant influence in rap culture, referring to raps by ] and ]. | |||
| <blockquote>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.”... 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.<ref name = "char">Charise L. Cheney, ''Brothers Gonna Work It out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism'', New York University Press, 2005, pp. 81, 135.</ref></blockquote> | |||
| ] of ] 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.”.<ref name = "char"/> | |||
| ] of the ] promotes the story of Yakub in the ]'s song "Raw Hide," saying: "A mystery god that's the work of Yacub / The Holy Ghost got you scared to death kid boo!". In the ]'s song "]", at the end of it, can be heard a vocal sample from a 1977 movie '']'' which says about Yakub: "''Yakub, maker and creator of the devil. Swine merchant... your time is near at hand. Fuck with me and your time will be now. Your presence here affects the mind of my people like a fever. You, Yakub, are the bearer of nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine diseases, evil, corrupt, porkchop-eatin' brain!''". | |||
| ] member ] also references the story of Yakub in his song "One" from his album ]. He raps: "A-yo, the Devil planted fear inside the black babies." He concludes the verse with: "Dead meat placed on the shelves, we eat cold cuts / Fast from the hog y'all and grow up,"<ref>{{Citation|title=Ghostface Killah (Ft. T.M.F.) – One|url=https://genius.com/Ghostface-killah-one-lyrics|language=en|access-date=2018-08-02}}</ref> advocating the NOI's dietary practice of avoiding pork.<ref>]</ref>{{Better source|reason=per WP:CIRCULAR|date=January 2018}} | |||
| ] raps "You devils will run back into the caves you came from" in his song "Message To The Feds, Sincerely, We're The People" from his album ]. | |||
| On a freestyle to ]'s song "We Made It", ] says "All these devils, I got to strike some" and ] says "I'm ready to chase the Yakub back into caves". | |||
| ==References== | |||
| {{Reflist}} | |||
| *], ''Competing visions of Islam in the United States: a study of Los Angeles'', Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997, {{ISBN|978-0-313-29951-3}}, pp. 146ff. | |||
| {{Authority control}} | |||
| {{DEFAULTSORT:Yakub (Nation Of Islam)}} | |||
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Yakub (sometimes spelled Yacub or Yaqub) is a figure in the beliefs of the Nation of Islam (NOI). According to their beliefs,
whyte peepole be like: yea man we we created yakub!