A Passionate Advocate of Sufi Wisdom

Staff Writer - Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom
Saturday, March 29, 2008

Shusha Guppy, who died on March 21 aged 72, was an Iranian-born writer, composer and singer.

Trilingual in Persian, French and English, she wrote stylishly and succinctly in the last two and made a reputation as an interpreter of Persian love songs and French chanson.

In exile from her native country, she became a passionate advocate of Sufi wisdom and the Persian classical literature on which she had been raised.

The daughter of Mohammed Kazem Assar, a distinguished liberal-minded Shia theologian and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tehran, she was born Shamsi Assar on December 24 1935 and grew up in an atmosphere of poetry and mystical chants in the Persia of the Shahs.

She movingly evoked her childhood and the Tehran of her youth in The Blindfold Horse: memories of a Persian childhood (1998).

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As well as perfoming at concerts, she brought out 10 albums and published several books, while working as London editor of the American literary journal The Paris Review.

In the 1970s she travelled with the nomadic Bakhtiari tribes of southern Persia and worked on two films, one of which, People of the Wind (A Persian Odyssey), won an Oscar nomination for best documentary.

By the 1980s she had turned away from political radicalism, finding comfort in Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam which emphasises the unity of religious creeds and the centrality of love.

Her inclusive beliefs were challenged by the rise of militant Islam and in later life she was much exercised by the worsening relations between the Islamic world and the West.

After her marriage was dissolved in 1976 she lived modestly in a small flat in Chelsea, where she continued to dispense generous hospitality and wisdom to her friends.

Shusha Guppy's other books include Looking Back (1991), a series of interviews with living authors, and The Secret of Laughter (2006), a collection of Persian tales which showed her homeland to be less part of an "axis of evil" than a land of scented gardens and nomadic storytellers.