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I was very shocked to hear of Shusha’s death last week. I had no idea she was ill – I hadn’t been following the press much recently. I’ve known her for over twenty years but live far away and so when uncharacteristically she hadn’t responded to a couple of e-mails over the past couple of months or so, I’d assumed that she was just visiting her family in South Africa or something like that. And then, the other day I came across an obituary. My condolences to her family.
She has always been very supportive of my work and of me personally - I’ll always remember the lovely letter she wrote to me after my own mother died. Her music – she had the richest, most sonorous and emotive voice I have ever heard – that elegant distillation, suffused with humanity, of Persian, French and English philosophy, letters and music, combined with her engaged, affable and very Sufi-like persona contributed in some way to my becoming a writer. She was a hugely talented woman and was unique. Shusha was real. Her songs and her books are with us, but she is not – and the world is a lesser place. Now, when I look over the last e-mail she sent me, late last year, characteristically helpfully in response to a query I’d had about Persian for a novel on which I was working, the last word of the last sentence was the word, “Allah”.
Roger Scruton wrote a very moving obituary in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/24/iran?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews
All human belief systems contain vigorous aspects of syncretism and the relationship between the ideas of pantheism and divine immanence is very real. However, you just have to look at the work of most authoritative academic commentators, as well as at the prodigious history and the literature, both religious and poetic, going back many centuries (much of which has yet to be translated into English), to realise that Islam and Sufism are mutually intrinsic. It is not fashionable currently to associate Islam or the Prophet Muhammad with anything positive and this is consequent upon an unfortunate and inaccurate geopolitical dynamic. Shusha was enormously knowledgeable on the subject and her last programme, made in Iran for BBC radio in 2006, illustrated all of this – I would strongly advise anyone who wishes to learn more about this area to try and get access to that programme. It should be played in all schools throughout the land. In many ways, one of things she stood for was this, a precise and lucid understanding of the tolerant, gnostic, mystical emanation of Islam which is known as Sufism and which indeed is the very root, the source, of the religion. May her soul rest in peace. Amen.
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