Love Flowed

By Asadullah, " The departure of an Australian soul" - The News International - Karachi, Pakistan
Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Looking around with Surma-laden eyes and covering her head with a traditional Dupatta that allows snow-white hair to curl out, Amatullah Jyly Armstrong looks like a Western custodian of a local shrine.

Alas, after living in Karachi for a decade, she has moved to Johannesburg.

Between spiritual journeying from Muckle Flugga Farm in Sydney to Zawia Ebrahim out of Johannesburg, Jyly came to one of Karachi’s early post-independence neighbourhoods called PIB Colony.

She disappeared last year but I recently found her on Facebook, only to discover that she had gone to South Africa on a one-way ticket. Though I had seen her at different places in Karachi, I never had a chance to know her.

I met her for the first time in Delhi’s police station one fine morning in October 2005 on my second trip to India. I realised that I was carrying her book The Sky is Not the Limit in my backpack and ended up introducing myself, mentioning this very fact to her. She was amazed, and said we were destined to meet in Delhi. She introduced me to her companion, Mehmood Ghaznavi, the youngest of the great Sabri brothers. Seeing them together reminded me that Jyly had appeared in one of his rare qaw’wali videos.

After writing a small message in the book, she invited me to have Iftar together at Delhi’s Jama Masjid, but since I was heading straight to Haryana, I excused myself. We stayed in touch mostly through text messages. I met her again at Costa Coffee on Shaheed-e-Millat Road, where we talked at length about the Sufi path that she took in early eighties. Let me introduce her to you.

Amatullah Armstrong Chishti, known as Jyly to her family and friends, is a trained art teacher. Her spiritual quest began in the early eighties when she rode some 5,000 kilometres on a bicycle from France to Tunisia. On the journey, she encountered Islam and formally embraced the faith in 1984 in the Algerian Sahara Desert.

As a spiritual traveller connected to the Chishti Silsila, Jyly left Australia in 1998 for Karachi. She tied the knot with Mehmood Sabri at the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi and collaborated with him to send the Sufi message in Pakistan and abroad.

She promoted Mehmood’s Qaw’wali as his manager here and abroad. After knowing that she had left Pakistan almost for good, I was curious to know her experiences of the city we all love and hate. She was very forthcoming, and like a scholar, posted an excerpt from her last book, The Lamp of Love:

“Pakistan ripped me apart and opened me up to an inflowing and an outpouring. Love flowed to me from so many people. And I reciprocated with a great outpouring of love and compassion for them. Everywhere I went I encountered raw, beautiful, sad, joyful, exultant, desolate, dignified, impoverished humanity. Pakistan changed my entire life.”

“But I cannot go back to [the solitude of Australia’s north coast beaches]. I would be miserable and would yearn for the freedom of Karachi’s chaos! Yes, there is a freedom here too, the freedom to lose oneself in the multitudes.”

“Riding in a rickshaw through the polluted city streets, I catch those fleeting passing images of humanity, images of pathos and joy and dignity and impoverishment that flood my heart with an intense love. Thank Allah for the experience.”

Jyly is working on a new commentary to one of her old books, which she says has many points that she now considers quite wrong. She is also thinking of publishing her post-graduate thesis titled The Artist Transformed: Sufi Views on the Development of the Self and Art.

Her marriage is amicably over. She has left Karachi, very much like Costa Coffee, although she misses the coffees and meetings with all her friends in Karachi and Lahore.

“It’s amazing that we do actually mature on this journey through life,” she writes. “Looking back at a 1994 book makes me somewhat embarrassed, but hopefully there will be benefit in the new commentary I’m presently working on.”