DETROIT – A local cultural anthropologist is working to help Arab and Muslim families capture their elders’ stories and keep their history alive.

Zarinah El-Amin, a Detroit native, has worked in book publishing since 2009 but said that everything shifted for her when she lost her parents, her mother in 2019 and her father in 2023.

“My roots run through the American South and Detroit’s Black Muslim community,” she said. “My father, Imam Abdullah El-Amin, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and came to Detroit as a child during the great Migration, the wave of Black families who left the Jim Crow South for a safer, better life up north (many of them working at Ford). He embraced Islam in 1976 under Imam W. Deen Mohammed, and in 1983 he and my mother, Dr. Cheryl El-Amin, co-founded the Muslim Center of Detroit along with other families.”

El-Amin said that she was raised inside the whole of Detroit’s ummah and in close relationship with the Arab Muslim community and her father was among the early imams at the Muslim Center conducting janazah (funeral) services for Muslim families.

“This life story work is, in many ways, a continuation of his: making sure none of our stories are lost,” she said. “When you lose the people closest to you, it gives you a different pair of glasses to look at life with. So many of the stories I’d heard for years ended up six feet in the ground. I’d lost the chance to record.”

From her loss, El-Amin started The Legacy Storykeepers, the nation’s fastest growing life story preservation company “focused on stories of people most often left out of America’s history.”

“We can’t only focus on the financial inheritance,” she said. “We have to focus on the cultural inheritance too. We’re sitting on gold, and we have to preserve it before it’s gone. Like most African American families, if we trace back far enough our roots are in West Africa, but the slave trade erased those records generations ago. From talking to many Arab immigrants and children of immigrants, many of your readers carry their own version of that fear: elders who left Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine and worried their stories, their villages, their history might disappear with them. That urgency to hold onto who we are is exactly what my work is about.”

El-Amin’s work has taken on many different forms including the publishing of Under the Sana’a Skyline, a children’s book by Yemeni American teacher Salwa Mawari, illustrated by Mary Charara, that follows a young girl named Belquis in Old Sana’a. One of her current projects is Journey of Faith, a forthcoming book by Imam Elahi of the Islamic House of Wisdom.

Cover of children’s book, “Under the Sana’a Skyline”

The Legacy Storykeepers works two ways: through a guided group program in which authors write their own stories with trained legacy coaches called the Life Story Academy and through ghostwriting, where a legacy writer interviews the author and shapes their memories, photos, and family history into a finished book. 

While the work is done mostly in English, the team can also produce books in Arabic.

“The easiest first step is my free legacy writing class,” El-Amin said. “Anyone thinking about preserving their own story, or a parent’s or grandparent’s, can come, meet me, and talk it through with no pressure.”

El-Amin said that she wants Arab American families to know that this resource is here for them and that she is not a stranger to the community.

“You don’t have to be famous or wealthy to have a story worth keeping,” she said. “Every family does, especially our elders whose journeys of migration and survival have never been written down. My hope is to make preserving your life story as normal as writing a will, so the wisdom in our communities stops ending up six feet in the ground.”

More information can be found on the website www.legacystorykeepers.com or by emailing El-Amin at legacy@legacystorykeepers.com or calling 313-761-2925.