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According to the Nation of Islam (NOI), Yakub is an evil scientist responsible for the creation of the white race &mdash 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 six hundred years for Yakob 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. His progeny are destined to rule for six thousand years before the original black peoples of the world regain dominance, a process that began in 1914.

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

The name Yakub is a variant of the Arabic form of the name Jacob, suggesting that the Biblical Jacob's role as the father of the tribes of Israel had been adapted to reposition him as the originator of white peoples 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, that were popular among White supremacists at the time. Though the NOI has had a history of anti-Semitism, the figure of Yakub generalises 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 rationalised within the NOI as a parable or an allegory for the evolution of whites from the earliest black-skinned human populations in Africa. White peoples evolved as a result of climatic differences, as humanity migrated out of Africa and populated other areas of the globe. Such colorful storytelling, they argue, is 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.