A PERSIAN hymn composed by Bahram Dehqani-Tafti, the Bishop of Chelmsford’s brother, who was shot dead on the age of 24, is to be played on Radio 4 on Friday as a part of Desert Island Discs.
The Bishop, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, selected the track after describing being told of his death while she was at college. She was 13. Her older sister had chosen not to inform her until the facts had change into clear.
She ascribed his killing, which prompted her family to maneuver to England, to “the chaos of revolution”. She recalled there being just seven people on certainly one of the last BA flights to depart Iran and the “physical ache” that got here with the lack to return.
“We’ve spent a lifetime coming to terms with it, and, in a way, it was his sacrifice that brought us here,” she said, of her brother’s killing. “He gave us the gift of the prospect of a recent life on this country. . . It’s a way of honouring his memory and attempting to see the great in what’s a wicked and evil situation.”
Two weeks before the killing, an assassination attempt was also made on her parents. She still has a pillow case with a “halo” of bullet holes around where her father’s head had been.
Dr Francis-Dehqani was appointed Bishop of Loughbrough in 2017 (News, 14 July 2017). It was “symbolic of pulling something from the boundaries into the center: this small, tiny Anglican community in the course of nowhere through me now almost at the center of the Establishment”, she said.
She is the third Anglican bishop in three generations of her family. Her father, Hassan, who got here from a devout Muslim family, was the Bishop in Iran from 1961 to 1990, and her maternal grandfather, the Rt Revd William Thompson, was a predecessor. It had been her paternal grandmother’s last wish that her eldest son be educated by British missionaries — in the long run it was the second son, Hassan, who was.
Dr Francis-Dehqani’s other selections for Desert Island Discs included “Morgh-e-Sahar”, an Iranian “anthem for the struggles of freedom” and Sinéad O’Connor’s “Take me to church” (a reminder that “religion and the Church, which needs to be a spot of healing, sadly often causes quite a lot of hurt as well”).
The cello a part of “Bahram’s Melody”, a setting of words by Dr Francis-Dehqani’s father, was performed by her son, Gabriel. “He jogs my memory quite a lot of my brother; they’d have gotten on thoroughly,” she said.
The episode of Desert Island Discs, first broadcast on Sunday, is obtainable on BBC Sounds.
