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This article covers the figure in the theology of the Nation of Islam. The name, also spelled Yaqub or Yakob, also applies to the Islamic view of the Biblical Jacob. See Yaqub and Jacob for information on the latter.

According to the Nation of Islam (NOI), Yakub (also spelled Yacub), was an evil scientist responsible for creating the white race — a race of devils, in their view. Yakub created white people by a process of "grafting" from the original black population of the world. It took 600 years for Yakub and his successors to fully whiten his creations. This was achieved under a despotic regime on the island of Patmos. The reasons for Yakub's actions are unclear. According to NOI doctrine, his progeny were destined to rule for 6,000 years before the original black peoples of the world regained dominance, a process that began in 1914.

The doctrine of Yakub was first proclaimed by Wallace Fard Muhammad and was later developed by his successor Elijah Muhammad.

The name Yakub is a variant of the Semitic name referred to in European language versions of the Bible as Jacob or in modern Jewish communities as Ya’akov. Fard Muhammad appears to have adapted the Biblical Jacob's role as the father of the tribes of Israel to reposition him as the originator of white people as a whole (including Jews). The idea that Jacob/Yakub was the founder of a deviant, corrupt people is probably adapted from late nineteenth and early twentieth century anti-Semitism, in which the concept of racial degeneration was commonplace. The notion that the Jews were an artificial people arising from corrupt racial mixing is found in the works of Alfred Rosenberg and other racialists. Yakub's grafting activities seem to refer to the ideas of eugenicists, popular at the time. The figure of Yakub generalizes racial antipathy to all white people, of whom Jews now form a sub-group.

In recent times, the so-called doctrine of Yakub has been rationalized within the NOI as an allegory for the evolution of whites from the original black-skinned human populations of Africa, and as a parable warning of the dangers of eugenics. Yakub's 600-year experiment is seen as colorful storytelling, little different from the Bible's account of God creating Eve from Adam's rib, or the creation of heaven and earth in six days. In his autobiography (written with Alex Haley), El-Hajj Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) notes that, in his travels in the Middle East, many Muslims reacted with shock upon their discovery of the doctrine of Yakub.

The African American Playwright Amiri Baraka wrote a play titled A Black Mass based on the mythology of Yakub.

Yakub may have some connection to the biblical Jacob/Yakub who seemingly had a close relative who was an albino. Leading some to speculate that Yakub may have someway fallen upon the idea to create the white race because of this. The accepted story is that as a young boy he played with magnets and saw the attraction of opposites, he then vowed to someday create a race opposite to his own.

The grafting theory in this sense may further be described as a form of evolution through artificial selection. Yakub and his fellow scientist would kill the darker babies and allow the lighter ones to survive, the lighter ones would then procreate with one another. Over time the brown, red, yellow, and finally the white race would be created. In a sense it could be viewed in the same sense as basic human evolution except that it had occurred at a highly increased rate due to human interference.

• Nation of Islam
• Pseudohistory