Emerick was born into an American Protestant Christian family, and converted to Islam in 1989 while a freshman at Michigan State University. He later obtained a graduate degree in history.

Emerick has served as a Muslim lecturer, educator and prayer leader, but his greatest fame has come as an author. He founded Amirah Publishing in 1992, in order to further his goal of publishing American-oriented literature on Islam. Emerick's Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam has been distributed worldwide by Alpha books, while his juvenile fiction books have been rated amongst the very first examples of the Islamic fiction genre. Islamic Fiction Books (IFB) One of Emerick's books has been adopted into the curriculum of Al-Azhar University in Egypt, the world's oldest college and its foremost Islamic Institute. From 1998 until 2008 his books were all published by Noorart Inc.