I Dared to Call Him Father

I Dared to Call Him Father is a 1978 memoir by Pakistani Christian missionary Bilquis Sheikh. Considered a hallmark of Christian evangelical literature, Sheikh recounts her journey from the daughter of a wealthy Muslim family in Pakistan to her vocational religious career. Along the way, Sheikh, whose family is highly respected, was troubled by religious intolerance in Pakistan, which even led to threats against her life. She eventually moved her work and family to the United States, becoming a renowned author internationally. Sheikh asserts that her life has amounted to a “journey toward Christianity” that took place as a series of crises of faith. The memoir has been criticized for having a strong moralist bias towards Christianity and advocating somewhat reductive readings of Islamic philosophy and culture.

Sheikh begins her memoir by recounting the year she was forty-six. Born into a wealthy and politically powerful family in Wah, Pakistan, she enjoyed luxury throughout her life, living in a mansion surrounded by a botanical garden. The citizens of the nearby town praised and respected Sheikh, calling her by her birth name, Begum. Due to a combination of her status (the descendant of a long line of members of the ruling class) and her good character, Sheikh became a famous figure in Pakistan. Raised in Islam, she identified as a practicing Muslim.

Sheikh’s stable, domestic life was interrupted when her husband abruptly left her, claiming that he no longer loved her. Sheikh fell into a deep depression, which negatively affected her attitude: she began to mistreat her servants and members of the lower class in Wah. Around the same time, she experienced a series of strange visions and dreams, many with Christian imagery. In one dream, she met a man, unfamiliar to her at the time, who called himself John the Baptist. She claims to have had no knowledge of the name at the time of the dream. In another, she was seated at dinner with Jesus Christ. She began to believe that these dreams were calling her urgently towards the Christian faith.



Initially, Sheikh was hesitant to abandon the path of Islam to follow another faith. Because she was a Muslim Pakistani woman, she knew her ability to identify as something other than Muslim was impaired by Pakistan’s many regressive norms and controls on religious practice and gender. It was forbidden, for example, to read the Bible. She broke the law by reading the Bible in secret, mainly hoping to interpret her dreams. She also reached out to David Mitchell, a renowned reverend. Mitchell’s wife, Synnove, befriended Sheikh and prayed alongside her for her Christian awakening.

Sheikh made a number of Christian friends, most notable among them Marie and Ken Olds. She met a doctor who was also a practicing Catholic nun. The doctor comforted Sheikh through her crisis of faith, soothing her fears about acknowledging a Christian god. Ultimately, Sheikh committed her life to Jesus and a Christian vocation. She underwent a formal religious conversion, risking her safety and reputation in the process. When her family learned about her conversion, they publicly renounced her and cut off all ties.

In the months and years after her break with her family, Sheikh received multiple death threats against her and her family. These threats only convinced her to reaffirm more strongly her faith in Christian salvation. When a new political regime was installed in Pakistan, Sheikh’s property was threatened by legislation that proposed to reappropriate large amounts of land belonging to the descendants of the ruling class. Sheikh largely accepted her lost land, and began a more modest life, in devout adherence to Scriptural values. Eventually, she moved to the United States with Mahmud, her grandson. Though she terribly misses the country she once called home, she ranks her religious awakening and intense devotion to Christ above any other affiliation. I Dared to Call Him Father is a story that ties together the acts of self-affirmation and religious rebellion.