Bilquis Sheikh was born in 1912 into one of the most prominent Muslim families in the Punjab; her former husband had served as a minister of the interior of Pakistan. Living in retirement on her estate at Wah in the mid-1960s and disturbed by a recurring dream, she began reading the Qur'an and a Bible given to her by a missionary side by side.
She reported that the decisive moment came not in study but in prayer, when she dared — against everything in her culture — to address God simply as "Father". She was baptised in 1966. Her family disowned her, her servants left, and threats forced her finally to leave Pakistan in 1972.
Her memoir, I Dared to Call Him Father (1978, with Richard Schneider), has been continuously in print and translated into more than thirty languages. She died in the United States in 1997.