from the introduction to Nathaniel Deutsch’s
“Inventing America’s “Worst” Family”

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11113/11113.intro.php

“There is only one problem with Hugo Leaming’s ingenious and inspiring portrait of the Tribe of Ishmael: it isn’t true. Ben Ishmael was not an “Islamic saint or Imam,” his name does not reflect a corruption of the Arabic “ibn Ishmael,” as Leaming also suggested in his essay. Nor was Ben Ishmael of African descent. Moreover, the Tribe of Ishmael was never an Islamic community, and the vast majority of the people identified as Ishmaelites over the years were of Western European background, although a relatively small minority did possess some African or Native American ancestry. Indeed, as I will show, a careful examination of all the published and unpublished sources on the Tribe of Ishmael reveals that only one of Leaming’s major claims remains a possibility, namely, that some of the individuals identified as Ishmaelites may have become early members of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. In light of the available evidence, however, even this assertion does not rise beyond the level of conjecture.
If the evidence is so weak, how and why did Hugo Leaming arrive at his startling conclusions? Leaming had complex personal reasons for reimagining the Tribe of Ishmael as a primarily African American Islamic community. Born into a white, middle-class Christian family from Virginia, Leaming decided later in life that he was actually triracial and, despite his upbringing, became a member of the Moorish Science Temple, the first African American Islamic group. In short, Hugo Leaming assumed the same racial and religious identity that he invented for the Tribe of Ishmael. While Leaming’s own dramatic metamorphosis helped shape his interpretation of the Ishmaelites, broader cultural and ideological currents also influenced his portrait.
Unlike Oscar McCulloch, who “discovered” the Tribe of Ishmael when Islam was widely seen in the West as a religion in decline, Leaming produced his study of the Tribe of Ishmael in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights era in the United States, when prominent African American Muslims such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali had become cultural icons. At the same time, Islamicists in other countries were attacking Western imperialism and their own corrupt governments. By the 1970s, far from being a symbol of decay, as it had been for Orientalists during the nineteenth century, Islam had now come to signify in the eyes of many—including Hugo Leaming—robust and popular resistance to colonialism, racism, and economic oppression.
It is also important to appreciate that Leaming was able to reimagine the Tribe of Ishmael as Muslim because earlier authors had already exploited contemporary tropes of Islam in their own portraits, beginning, of course, with the Islamic sounding names coined for the group. In this respect, the Tribe of Ishmael’s story sheds new light on what Vijay Prashad has evocatively referred to as “the undisciplined world of U.S. orientalism.”
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Contrary to popular belief, Americans did not encounter Islam for the first time in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the roots of Islam in America date back centuries to the numerous Muslim slaves brought to these shores from Africa. Nor did it take Malcolm X or even the members of Al Qaeda for Islam to become part of America’s collective consciousness. Instead, Islam has been present in the popular American imagination for centuries. As I will argue throughout this book, each stage of the Tribe of Ishmael’s story corresponds to a different phase in this fascinating but largely unwritten history of American Orientalism.
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One way of understanding Hugo Leaming’s radical reinterpretation of the Tribe of Ishmael, therefore, is that he literalized elements of their identity that had previously functioned on a symbolic level. Earlier writers like McCulloch and Estabrook had depicted the vast majority of the tribe’s members as white Upland Southerners of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. At the same time, however, McCulloch and Estabrook symbolically likened all of the Ishmaelites—white and nonwhite alike—to marginalized groups such as Gypsies, Native Americans, and Muslims. In his revisionist study of the Ishmaelites, Leaming flipped the actual ethnic and racial proportions of the tribe’s members so that African Americans now dominated numerically and culturally. Leaming also literalized the previously symbolic association of the Ishmaelites with Islam. Almost alchemically, he had transformed a collection of poor, overwhelmingly white, Upland Southern migrants into an African American Islamic community.
Despite its mythical quality, Leaming’s version of the Ishmaelites’ story illuminates a number of recurring themes in the history of African American Islam. The first is the powerful role that reinvention has played in the creation of new and distinctly American Islamic identities. In this respect, Leaming’s transformation of the Tribe of Ishmael into an Islamic community and Ben Ishmael into an “Islamic saint or Imam,” recalls the equally dramatic religious transformations of individuals such as Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. The second theme is best expressed by the Nation of Islam’s phrase “lost-found nation,” that is, the idea that the original Islamic identity of African Americans needs to be recovered and restored. Seen from this perspective, Leaming’s revisionist interpretation of the Tribe of Ishmael fits into a broader pattern of reclaiming the supposedly obscured Islamic roots of all African Americans.
Finally, Leaming’s identification of the Tribe of Ishmael as a “colored” community reflects a common American tendency to racialize Islam and, more specifically, to view it as a religion of nonwhites. To appreciate how deeply this racialization of Islam has penetrated the consciousness of many Americans, we need only recall Malcolm X’s great surprise upon encountering blond-haired, blue-eyed Muslims on his pilgrimage to Mecca or, more recently, how governmental profiling of terrorist suspects has relied on narrow and misleading assumptions of what Muslims are supposed to look like.”

Peace,

Sean Fahey
Endless Eye
Chicago IL
http://www.endlesseye.org

Thank you so much for the work you are doing in the history of the Ben Ishmael folk; it is much appreciated andm uch needed. We do hope that you continue your invaluable work in this area, and that Allah bless you and promote your every endeavor.

Sincerely yours,

(Rt. Rev.) Sotemohk A. Beeyayelel
Bishop of New Jersey, Morish Orthodox Church in America;
Rector, Hakim Bey Diocesan Theological Seminary;
President & Vice Chancellor, Alamut College
Pemberton Township, New Jersey

Their line is formed from various branches which came together in the isolation of Appalachia, where they originally congregated for safety. Some are the descendants of escaped slaves, some of Indians, some of Muslim Spanish/North African shipwreck survivors, some of criminal Scots-Irish white trash. The important thing to note is that for almost a hundred fifty years–that’s five generations or so, none of these people had the luxury of prejudice. They literally screwed themselves into one color.

The gentry considered them less than human for years, and had it not been for their remote mountain homes, supposed evil powers and ways with black magic, they would’ve been the recipients of more vitriol than they were.

The supposed “black magic” I think refers to syncretistic hill religion borne of distant memories of great grandma speaking of how there is no god but god, etc. Modern white pentecostalism owes its quarrels with The Catholic Church and the trinity–especially its insistence on a unified godhead–to these memorial echoes.

The group to whom Sepoy refers is but one poor group of these melungeons, with a particularly strong tie to the distant parent faith.

Some of those who remain in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia are “rediscovering” thier roots instead of trying to hide or lose them; they’re down with identity politics and not into apologizing for their multiracial identity. They’re bolstered by the generally decent work of a responsible amateur scholar named Brent Kennedy, who has worked with groups as diverse as the Turkish and Libyan governments, which are interested in proving Muslims have been on the continent as long as Jews and Christians.

As for the South Carolina flag, I can only speculate. There should be a history of the South Carolina state flag somewhere on the net.

I am doing my own research on the Tribe of Ben-Ishmael with the Indiana State Library. One aspect of my research concerns the infamous Revernd Jim Jones, and his shadowy-origins. It struck me that he did his early social-work in the depressed areas of Indianapolis–site of the Ishmaelite-ghettoes. He always said he had “Indian-origins,” and this seems like something an outsider (or was he?) would say to the descendents of Ishmaelites. Any help would be greatly-appreciated, this a neglected-area of research.