The Mystic from Pakpattan - Amatullah Armstrong

The narrow winding alleys that ascend up to the darbar of Baba Fareed Ganj Shakar in Pakpattan are abuzz with qawwali, the beat of dhol and shopkeepers calling out from tabaruk shops. It is a surreal world. Made even more so by the presence of an enchanting tall, white woman seated most comfortably before the langar khana; a place where free food for devotees is prepared.

The woman is Amatullah Armstrong. She is an Australian by birth but has lived in so many times and places all over the world that she seems to be above time and place. She is an acclaimed author and a Sufi dervish who came to Islam after 7-years of intense search for what she describes as ‘truth and the true direction of life’. Nothing about her is ordinary.

She tells enchanting stories of how she saw a whale giving birth in the Pacific Ocean while being protected by a circle of dolphins, or how Paulo Coelho met her with warm regards and compliments in Poland where she and her qawwal husband were his guests. Her books have been published in various languages and she has a terrific fan following with people yearning to know more about Islam and Sufism. Listening to her timeless tales in the darbar of Baba Farid seemed liked an incredible experience.

Smiling, she relates her story of coming to Islam that took her through dozens of countries around the world. “It was a long journey. I remember the first seeds were perhaps sown by my father who was a big lover of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. My father was a very dashing and romantic man and the way he read Khayyam’s poetry had a big impact on me. The seeds were watered further when a teacher at the school in Sydney taught me a poem ‘Abu Ben Adhem’ when I was 8. It was about the great Sufi master Ibrahim Adham; the king of Balkh. That poem had a remarkable influence on me for the rest of my life. There was a period of draught for the seeds during my teenage years, the hippie years and my Beatle fan years. I went to an Art School and married a man I had met there against my parents’ wishes. Over the years I got disenchanted by the superficiality of the Art scene with the constant ego battles and the rat race and we moved to the countryside. Exposed to the nature I began scratching the surface of various philosophies like Hari Krishna and Zen Buddhism.”

Her fascinating journey took shape when she moved to France with her first husband in 1978. She says, “In France, beautiful catholic places like the Notre Dam cathedral showed that people there took Catholicism very seriously which was not the case in Australia. I used to go to all these cathedrals but funnily I never related to the concept of Trinity. Jesus Christ was always such a beautiful, beautiful man for me and I couldn’t comprehend him being the son of God. I always connected to God alone. In retrospect, being in France played an incredible role in my journey. When I used to walk in the woods, sit at the hill top with my dog and behold the splendor I was so much in love with Allah even before I became a Muslim. It took me so many years to realize that Allah had been calling me for a long time but I never really listened.”

Amatullah took up studying religion fervently while in France. She kept trying to find a way of connecting to God. Meanwhile, her first husband was a struggling artist so the couple kept running into and out of money. Always on the look out for adventure one day they decided to buy a bicycle each and cycle all the way to Italy to visit the basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi because she had great regard of the Saint. She recalls, “On our way to Assisi, we ran out of money around Corsica and decided to stay there for a while till we had enough money. My husband found work at a building where the Morrocan laborers came to know of us and persuaded us to go to North Africa rather than Italy. So we cycled 5000 miles towards North Africa. My beloved dog died the second day of our reaching Africa and I was devastated apart from being physically exhausted. I asked my husband to take me to a Church because I needed help. A Church we found in Tunis had its doors locked and I thought that was the last chance Christianity had with me because I desperately needed to get into the Church and could not.

Some days later in Tunisia we went to a Souk and I needed to buy a souvenir. The man who took us through the beautiful ancient Souk kept turning back towards me and looking straight in my eyes said in French again and again, ‘It is God who directs’. I was fascinated by the Muslim man’s message because it came at a time when I was emotionally shattered. I went back to Australia with a urge to look into Islam which I had never ever done before for the images of repressed women and violence always kept me off. I looked through books and studied whatever little material I could find and each time I would read a verse from Quran Sharif my heart would say this is it. I was able to keep aside all the magazines which had propaganda about Islam in Iran during the Revolution and look at the religion objectively. I was enamored by works of the Sufi masters like Shaiykh Abdul Qadir Jilani because its essence was exactly what I wanted.”

After two years of intense study of whatever she could find on Islam, Amatullah went to North Africa again when her husband got commissioned to work in the Sahara desert. She says, “When I came to the Sahara, I was yearning to be a Muslim but my head was making ten million excuses. I was asking myself how l would pray back in Australia, how I would cover my head. But it was meant to be.”

While traveling through the Sahara by bus they stopped on the way for refreshments and a passenger got off to say his prayers. “The sight of the man prostrating in complete submission in the middle of the desert was like a bolt of lightening. I was entranced. In a flash I realized, this was what I was supposed to be doing. He came back to sit in the bus with the desert sand on his forehead and I was finished by the sight. I had a massive spiritual overload. When we got back to Algiers in a grotty little hotel I had a total collapse. Two years of yearning, crying and praying for guidance in my own way had got me my answer with a thunderous force. For the whole day I thought I was going to die and kept reciting la illaha illa lah in my delirium and found out much later that this was what the Muslims were required to say when embracing Islam.”

Amatullah was drawn to Sufism with a burning obsession. She read everything related to it and listened to Sufi music from around the world. She began listening to the Sabri Brothers from Pakistan and started enjoying their soulful renditions. However her coming to Islam was just the beginning of her journey towards Allah. Her first husband supported her through everything but the marriage didn’t last. He told her perhaps she never was his to begin with. She had a higher purpose.

While in Australia, Amatullah had a dream in which she saw a strange man sitting amid dervishes and telling them that she belonged to his (Sufi) Order. It was a very vivid dream and Amatullah recorded it in her diary and forgot all about it. Three years later she received a packet of videocassettes from her Australian Spiritual Guide and as she saw the Qawali of Sabri Brothers playing she was thunderstruck. The dream she had seen three years ago had the famous Ghulam Farid Sabri in it who was now playing qawali before her. She had never met him yet recognized him from the dream instantly. The day she recalled her dream was the beginning of her onward journey.

She began searching for the man even whose full name she didn’t know. Several months later to her desolation she found out from a contact in the USA that Haji Ghulam Farid Sabri had died before she saw him in the dream. In her words, “My connection with his was spiritual, across time and space.”

After writing two books on Sufism which Amatullah credits to the spiritual guidance of Haji Ghulam Farid Sabri, she finally came to Pakistan where a visit to Baba Farid at Pakpattan (the patron Saint of the Sabri Brothers) felt like a powerful homecoming. She, a white woman from distant shores of Australia decided to make Pakistan her permanent home.

For ten years Amatullah lived in Karachi after marrying the youngest Sabri brother Mehmood Ghaznavi, another celebrated qawwal. She went to Pakpattan off and on for spiritual rejuvenation often staying there for several weeks at a stretch. To her, Pakpattan is like home where she is accepted and loved as the ‘gori malang’. But despite being 60 years of age, and having found fulfillment upon fulfillment in life, Amatullah’s journey goes on.

She feels her next destination on her incredible spiritual Journey is South Africa where ‘she is being sent by Baba Farid to meet her new spiritual guide by the name of Ebrahim Schuitema’; a Caucasian Sufi Shaiykh who guides through the Shahdiliya Order of Sufis.

The incredible woman continues with her great quest defying physical boundaries to reach farther metaphysical heights.

An edited version of this article was published in Libas International Magazine Vol 3: 2008.

Photo by Ramla Akhtar.