The Big-Headed Scientist

About This Book

A man with an enormous head, born outside Mecca sixty-six centuries ago, who swore revenge on the people who mocked him and bred a new race to rule the world. No historian believes it happened. Yet the story of Yaqub was preached to hundreds of thousands, shaped Malcolm X, and still echoes through music and the internet today.

This book does two things, and says so at the outset. Part One tells the myth whole and straight, the way the tradition tells it, with its strangeness and grandeur left in. The rest of the book steps back: where the story came from, in Detroit in 1930; what it did, from Malcolm X's prison cell to hip-hop and memes; and how to weigh it honestly, as history, as theology and as a myth that has meant something to real people.

Book Details

What's Inside

• Part One: The Telling

  The myth from beginning to end, in 24 short chapters: the boy called Big Head, the magnets, the island, and the six thousand years.

• Part Two: Where It Came From

  Detroit's Black Bottom in 1930, a peddler called Fard, the Messenger, and the lessons that wrote it down.

• Part Three: What It Did

  Malcolm X believes, travels to Mecca and breaks away; the children of the doctrine; and the story's second life as a meme.

• Part Four: Weighing It

  What the evidence actually shows, what myths are for, the question of harm, and why this one endures.