"When an Elder Dies, a Library Burns": A Detroit Storykeeper's Mission to Save Arab and Muslim Family Histories
DETROIT — When Zarinah El-Amin lost her mother in 2019 and her father in 2023, she inherited more than grief. She inherited a silence she couldn't undo: years of unrecorded stories, gone the moment her parents were.
El-Amin, a Detroit-born cultural anthropologist, has spent the years since turning that loss into a mission. Her company, The Legacy Storykeepers, works with families — increasingly Arab American and Muslim families across metro Detroit — to record and publish the life stories of aging parents and grandparents before those memories disappear for good.
Her own roots run through Detroit's Black Muslim community: her father, Imam Abdullah El-Amin, arrived in the city as a child during the Great Migration from the Jim Crow South, converted to Islam in 1976, and co-founded the Muslim Center of Detroit in 1983 with El-Amin's mother, Dr. Cheryl El-Amin. He spent decades as an imam performing funeral services for Muslim families citywide, work that put him — and later his daughter — in close, sustained contact with Detroit's Arab Muslim community.
That closeness is central to how El-Amin talks about her work now. In interviews and in a TEDx talk built around the line "When an Elder Dies, a Library Burns," she has described a fear she says she hears constantly from Arab immigrants and their children: that the memory of a grandparent who left Yemen, Syria, Lebanon or Palestine — the name of a village, the details of a journey — will vanish with no one having written it down. "We're sitting on gold, and we have to preserve it before it's gone," she has said of that inheritance.
The Legacy Storykeepers offers two paths for families: a guided cohort program called the Life Story Academy, where people learn to write their own family histories with coaching, and a ghostwriting service in which a writer interviews an elder and shapes their memories, photographs and family history into a finished book. Most projects are produced in English, though the team says it can also work in Arabic.
El-Amin's model builds on years of oral-history work in Detroit's Muslim community. Before founding Legacy Storykeepers, she ran Book Power Publishing and produced "At Their Feet: 50 Black Muslim Elders Share Stories of Faith and Community Life," a 2023 oral-history collection built partly from interviews gathered through the Detroit Muslim Storytelling Project, a documentation effort she worked on alongside Western Michigan University researcher Dr. Alisa Perkins and the nonprofit Dream of Detroit. That earlier project — which she began in part because her father asked her to record his own story before illness made that impossible — established the interview-driven, community-rooted approach she has since extended to Arab American families.
Her published projects with Arab American ties include "Under the Sana'a Skyline," a children's book written by Yemeni American teacher Salwa Mawari and illustrated by Mary Charara, following a young girl in Old Sana'a. She is currently working on "Journey of Faith," a forthcoming book by Imam Elahi of the Islamic House of Wisdom.
El-Amin frames the work as something families should treat with the same seriousness as estate planning. "You don't have to be famous or wealthy to have a story worth keeping," she has 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."
For families interested in getting started, El-Amin offers a free introductory class through her website, legacystorykeepers.com, where she says people can learn the basics of capturing a parent's or grandparent's story with no obligation attached.
The urgency behind her pitch is rooted in her own timeline: the stories she didn't get to record from her parents are gone for good. It's a loss she now spends her days trying to spare other families — particularly the immigrant families she says carry the same fear in a different language.