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.
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.