Guli Francis-Dehqani

Guli Francis-Dehqani0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Presenter0:05

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were castaway to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:46

My castaway this week is Gully Frances Dikarney, Bishop of Chelmsford. She's the third Anglican bishop in three generations, following in the footsteps of her father and her grandfather. She also sits in Parliament as a Lord Spiritual, and you may have seen her at the coronation last year, giving Holy Communion to the King and Queen. The roots of her family tree are intertwined with her faith. She was born and raised in Iran and was, she says, happily between and betwixt the worlds of Christianity and Islam until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Her family were targeted and, amidst escalating violence, they were forced to leave and unable to return. She arrived in the UK aged 13 as a refugee. She was, she says, determined to transform her experience of living on the margins, both in Iran and in the UK, into something positive. She says, there's a sense in which I've always been a stranger and an interloper, living with the ever-present anxiety of just not quite fitting in. The challenge has been to not get stuck in that place. Bishop Guli Frances De Carney, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. It's really good to be here. Now, Guli, as I mentioned, your family history with the church goes back quite some way, and I think that the crozier, the staff that you use, is emblematic of that. Tell me about it.

Guli Francis-Dehqani2:07

So the wooden staff that I use initially belonged to my father, who was given it on his arrival in this country. And it was made of one solid piece of wood, and he used it for many years. And then in his old age, two or three years before he died, one day, without telling any of us, he just sawed the bottom of it off in order to make it walking stick height. And he carried on using it. It looks a bit like a shepherd's crook, but at walking stick height. And he used it until he died. And then it sat in our umbrella stand for a number of years. And then when I became a bishop, my husband had it restored to its full height with a new piece of wood and a metal cuff that connects the new and the old. So yes, I kind of think of myself as my own person, very different experiences, but connected through him both to my family's history but also to the church in Iran and indeed to the church in every time and place.

Presenter3:06

And there's a lovely kind of resonance to the attitude to that item, which is something so hugely symbolic, but also practical and useful.

Guli Francis-Dehqani3:14

Absolutely, and I think that says something about the person my father was, both kind of deeply spiritual but innately kind of realistic and practical in that sense.

Presenter3:24

Gully, you have a busy work life today. I wonder how you carve out time for quiet cont

Guli Francis-Dehqani3:28

Templation.

Guli Francis-Dehqani3:30

It's really important that I try to do that and it requires a certain discipline. So I do try to start every morning with a short period of time to read and then to have a little bit of silence before then saying morning prayer. So it's helped me over the years to learn how to let go of the things that I can't control. You know, the type of things that might keep me awake at night in the practice of silence has allowed me to practice the letting go.

Speaker 13:53

Yeah.

Guli Francis-Dehqani4:03

It's time for your first disc today, Gully. What have you chosen? So the first piece I've chosen is Foray's Requiem. It's one of the earliest pieces of Western classical music that I came to know and love, and it's punctuated my life at various points. I've performed in it on various occasions. I conducted it while I was an undergraduate at Nottingham University. I've listened to it in concert, and I've heard it within the liturgical setting, of course, where it's supposed to be heard.

Speaker 34:43

A Dave Mornet.

Speaker 34:53

Ila tremenda.

Speaker 14:55

Trevor Burrus

Speaker 35:06

Quando Chimovendi Sunt, Quando Cherendisunt Eta.

Speaker 35:20

Comfer the lit, piodic.

Presenter5:36

Le Berame from Foray's Requiem performed by Stephen Varco and the Cambridge Singers with the City of London Symphonia conducted by John Rutter.

Presenter5:45

Gully Francis De Carney, your first name is an abbreviation of Gulna. What does that mean?

Guli Francis-Dehqani5:51

In English? Gul means flower, and anar is pomegranate. So gulnar is pomegranate flower, and golli is diminutive sort of little flower. I've always been gulli. Apart from with my dad when I was little, occasionally I was gulnar. If you were in trouble.

Guli Francis-Dehqani6:07

You'd think, wouldn't you? But no, I think he just loved the name and occasionally liked to use the full version.

Presenter6:13

Oh, it is very beautiful. Tell me a little bit more about your dad. Your father, Hassan, is a man of enormous faith, and that was the driving force in his life. But what else do we need to know about him? How would you describe him?

Guli Francis-Dehqani6:24

He was very tenacious, he had a deep sense of justice. He came from a very small village in the centre of Iran called Taft, from a very devout religious Muslim family. His mother encountered the British missionaries and trained as a nurse in one of the hospitals that they had set up.

Guli Francis-Dehqani6:45

and she died when he was very young, and her dying wish was that her eldest son should have the opportunity to be educated by the missionaries.

Presenter6:54

Ah, so is that how he came to convert?

Guli Francis-Dehqani6:56

Yes. So his father, who was a very devout and spiritual man, couldn't quite bring himself to allow his eldest son to go, but he allowed his second son to go, which was my dad. And eventually, at the age of eighteen, he chose for himself to be baptized and went on then to be ordained and

Speaker 17:07

Mm.

Guli Francis-Dehqani7:15

Was by the time I was born bishop of the very, very small Anglican community in Iran.

Presenter7:20

And did choosing that path cause problems for him? Did it put him, you know, a distance between h him and his family?

Guli Francis-Dehqani7:26

Yeah.

Guli Francis-Dehqani7:27

Uh

Presenter7:27

Yeah.

Guli Francis-Dehqani7:27

I think it definitely caused a rift. Many families would have disowned a son or a family member who was baptised. Actually, they didn't do that. They remained in good relationship, but I think it was painful for them. He loved his father very much, and I think they arrived at a place where each said that they would pray for the other. And there was a kind of sense of acceptance there. But certainly for him, it raised all kinds of questions about his identity, how to be both fully Christian but also fully Persian. Because in Iran, you know, national and cultural and religious identity are very closely bound up. So to have seen to betray your faith is in a sense to be a betrayer of your nationality and culture. And so he became a bit of an outsider in his own country. But in the end, I think what it gave him in terms of meaning for his life and so on, he never regretted it.

Guli Francis-Dehqani8:25

Guli, it's time for your second piece of music today. What are we going to hear? It's called Morchesahar, which in English translates as dawn bird or morning bird. It's based on a poem that was written in the early 20th century. It's a very well-known song in Iran. It's become a little bit like a protest song, an anthem for the struggles of freedom. And every time I hear it, I can still hear my dad kind of humming along to it.

Speaker 38:51

Morves, I'm not sure.

Speaker 38:57

No big matter to

Speaker 39:02

No wish of the song.

Speaker 39:10

Burnish and can only burn.

Presenter9:22

Mohra Saha by Homayun Charjarian. Ghuli Francis Tikani, your mother Margaret was born in Iran. Her parents were missionaries. What was she like?

Presenter9:32

Yeah.

Guli Francis-Dehqani9:32

My mother was an extraordinary person. She was utterly selfless. She had a kind of combination of the kind of Victorian stoicism, but with a very, very deep love of Iran. She'd been born there, she she was raised there, she lived pretty much all her life there.

Presenter9:49

I mean, obviously, sharing a a deep faith and and love of Iran, but your parents' backgrounds sound quite different then. I mean, would that have been cause for demur? What did people around them think of their marriage and the fact that they'd got together?

Guli Francis-Dehqani10:03

I believe that they were warned by several people not to go ahead with the marriage. And I can kind of understand why, as you say, their backgrounds were so very different. The odds were against them, but there was a very, very deep bond between them. You know, my mother was the stable one in terms of providing family life for us, but my father couldn't have done the things he did. He couldn't have been the person he was without her support. So i in the end they were the kind of perfect match for each other and they defied the odds and had a very happy and long

Speaker 110:08

The map

Speaker 110:15

Boom.

Presenter10:31

Yeah.

Presenter10:35

Uh

Guli Francis-Dehqani10:35

Yeah.

Presenter10:36

Long marriage.

Guli Francis-Dehqani10:36

Yeah.

Guli Francis-Dehqani10:37

Uh

Presenter10:37

You were born in nineteen sixty six in Isfahan in central Iran, and brought up in the Bishop's House, the seat of the Anglican Church in the country. You went to a local school where you were the only Christian. Did you feel different from the other children?

Guli Francis-Dehqani10:51

I think yes is probably the honest answer, but it wasn't in any way a problem. It was just something that I accepted and it didn't stop me making friends. But I think yes, we were so for example around Christmas time we would go carol singing from the church, not not in the streets or anything, but around people's houses who were members of the church. So there was a very definite moving out of the church compound for something that was still connected with life there. So I remember those kinds of things and I remember there being interest in the streets. Sometimes we'd be followed. There was a certain amount of suspicion and there were groups always who I think felt threatened by our presence and so on. Uh

Presenter11:37

So were you aware of that at the time? I mean, how did how did that feel?

Guli Francis-Dehqani11:41

I think I was aware of it at the time, but it it sounds really strange, but it was just part of life. It's all I knew.

Presenter11:46

Life

Guli Francis-Dehqani11:48

Good.

Presenter11:48

It's time to go to the music. Your third choice today. What have you gone for and why?

Guli Francis-Dehqani11:54

This is A Ride on Time by Black Box.

Guli Francis-Dehqani11:57

So after I graduated in 1989, a short while after that, I joined the BBC as a trainee studio manager.

Guli Francis-Dehqani12:08

So this really takes me back to the initial training period in the BBC. I joined with a cohort of 15 and we trained, had about three months training period in Evesham where the BBC has a training centre and a lot of fun was had during that time and all I can say is that this piece reminds me of those days.

Speaker 312:53

You're such a first-hand picture

Speaker 312:57

You just want

Speaker 312:59

Yeah.

Presenter13:02

Black Box and Ride on Time.

Presenter13:04

Guli Francis Dikani, in nineteen seventy nine, the Iranian Revolution led to the establishment of an Islamic Republic in the country. At what point did you and your family realize life was going to be difficult for Christians living in the country because initially your father had been quite optimistic about change.

Guli Francis-Dehqani13:21

Ch

Guli Francis-Dehqani13:22

You're absolutely right that my father was supportive of a change in regime. You know, things had become very, very difficult under the former Shah and many, many people wanted to see change. But pretty quickly it became apparent that the revolution wasn't going to deliver what it had promised. Very early on in the revolution, one of our clergy in the city of Shiraz was found murdered in his study.

Speaker 113:45

It was fine.

Guli Francis-Dehqani13:47

Some of the church institutions, hospitals and schools and so on, were confiscated or closed down. Offices were raided. Our house was raided. Even after there was an attempt on my parents' life at one point in which my mother was injured. My father survived. My mother was injured. So they were in bed. It was early hours of the morning and two gunmen broke into the house and came into the room and shot, fired five shots. And I still have the pillowcase that shows what looks like a halo of bullet holes around where my father's head would have been. My mother threw herself over him. She said she thought they'd come to take him away again. He'd briefly been imprisoned before that. And so one bullet went through her hand.

Speaker 114:16

Yeah.

Guli Francis-Dehqani14:26

She ran after them down the stairs that went round the outside of the house, across the garden to where they'd climbed over the wall. And she didn't even notice that she'd been shot until she stopped and then looked and saw that the blood was dripping and the pain and so on, and was taken to hospital for surgery. But even after that, you know, I remember we walked to church that night along the street and just felt that, you know, that it was going to blow over, nobody thought it would last. Yeah, we we carried on for as long as we could, we simply carried on.

Speaker 314:33

And

Guli Francis-Dehqani14:58

And what about your friendships with other children?

Guli Francis-Dehqani15:02

One or two of my friends who were in more devout Muslim families were influenced by what they were hearing. I remember one friend very clearly once offering to carry her bag. She was struggling a bit and she said, Oh, no, no, you know, you're unclean. And teachers as well. I did start to get kind of ostracized a bit for no reason at all that, you know, they'd find an excuse to send me out of the class and I'd have to stand in the corridor or whatever. I remember having a sticker in one of my books, for example, that had a Bible verse on it or something like that, and one of the teachers being very angry about this and telling me to take it out, but refusing to do that, saying, No, actually, this is a matter of principle. So from a very young age, I think it inculcated in me a sense of principle and a deep sense of justice and the

Speaker 115:40

Just think it

Guli Francis-Dehqani15:46

Pain of injustice and being powerless.

Presenter15:50

Collie, it's time to go to your next piece of music, disc number four. What are we going to hear and why?

Guli Francis-Dehqani15:56

This is a piece by Frank Bridge. It's called Miniatures for Piano Trio. I've got three children. They've all left home now, but while the three of them were growing up, the house was always full of music. And this is a piece that I remember the three of them playing together, particularly during the lockdown where there was a lot of opportunity to play music together. This piece will remind me of the three of them playing.

Presenter17:19

Frank Bridge's Miniatures for Piano Trio performed by Jack Liebeck, Alexander Choushan, and Ashley Woss. Gully Francis De Carney, a week after the assassination attempt on your father, your parents went to Cyprus on church business. While they were there, the situation in Iran deteriorated and he was advised not to return, so your mother came back without him. And then the following year, events took a terrible turn. Your brother, Bakram, was killed. How did you find out what had happened?

Guli Francis-Dehqani17:51

I found out purely by accident at school. My mother was in Tehran at the time, and my brother was in Tehran as well. He was teaching at the university there. And he had been killed on the 6th of May. My eldest sister, who was looking after me, found out very late at night after I'd gone to bed. And because there was so much uncertainty around, she decided, and I completely understand this, she decided to not say anything to me. I don't quite know how she did it, but she saw me off to school the next morning.

Presenter18:25

She wanted to know what she was going telling you before she told you. Absolutely. I think she wanted to get it together for herself a little.

Guli Francis-Dehqani18:29

Think she wants

Guli Francis-Dehqani18:31

And not unduly caused me upset earlier than necessary. So she sent me off to school. But somebody at school had heard the news. So they said to me, I heard on the news this morning that your brother's been killed. And I just dismissed it. I said, oh no, it must be a mistake. And then earlier than the end of the school day, around lunchtime, I happened to spot my sister with a friend walking towards the school. And as soon as I saw her, I knew that what I'd heard was true. So actually, you know, my sister never needed to tell me. I knew straight away.

Presenter19:06

My new

Guli Francis-Dehqani19:08

Yeah.

Presenter19:09

And and just twenty four when when he lost his life. I mean, what perspective do you have on his death now as an adult? I'm sure it was incomprehensible to you as a young girl.

Guli Francis-Dehqani19:19

Yeah.

Guli Francis-Dehqani19:20

It was the chaos of revolution, I think, is all I can say. And I have to try and see it within that context. Two young men ambushed his car, got in. Eyewitness later told us that they'd had a brief conversation, and then one of them pulled a gun and killed him. So, yeah, we've spent a lifetime coming to terms with it, I guess. And in a sense, it was his sacrifice that brought us here. I don't think my mum and my sister and I would have left if we hadn't had a very good reason to. So, he gave us the gift of the chance of a new life in this country. That must be very

Presenter20:00

That must be very bittersweet in itself.

Guli Francis-Dehqani20:02

It is, but I it's it's a way of honouring I suppose it's a way of honouring his memory and trying to see the good in what is a wicked and and evil situation.

Presenter20:13

And of course, absolutely devastating f for your parents. I mean, it's a daily task to learn to forgive, and they were determined to do it, I think.

Presenter20:21

Yeah.

Guli Francis-Dehqani20:21

They were, and they never pretended it was easy. I think my father probably spent the rest of his life coming to terms with the fact that if he'd been there it would have been him and and not his son. But I think they were absolutely committed not to giving in and becoming bitter and angry and full of hate themselves. And so they dedicated themselves to continuing to serve in whatever way they could.

Guli Francis-Dehqani20:49

Curly

Presenter20:49

Francis DeCarney, it's time for your next piece of music. This is disc number five today.

Guli Francis-Dehqani20:56

This next piece was originally composed as a hymn tune by my brother Bahram for words that were written by my father. It is part of the Persian hymnal. It's still sung in the church in Iran today and by Persian Christians around the world. The version that we're going to hear is an arrangement that was done by David Peacock, who was my music teacher when I first came to England. And the cellist on this recording is my eldest son, Gabriel.

Guli Francis-Dehqani21:26

He reminds me a lot of my brother. They would have got on very well.

Presenter22:05

Variations on Bakram's Melody, composed by Bakram Dekhani Tafti, arranged by David Peacock and performed by Gabriel Francis Decarney, with Fiona Sweeney, Krzysztof Cahoot and Will Harmer.

Presenter22:19

Gully Francis Decani, on may twentieth, nineteen eighty, you left Iran with your mother and your eldest sister.

Presenter22:26

So you were leaving the only home you'd ever known in tragic circumstances. How do you remember the journey?

Guli Francis-Dehqani22:34

I remember sitting on this vast plane. It was one of the last BA flights to leave the country before BA stopped flying to Iran for a while. And I think there were seven of us on a on a massive Boeing jet. And I can remember it taking off and looking out the window and

Speaker 122:41

True.

Guli Francis-Dehqani22:50

down to the countryside and and wondering how long it would be before we'd be back. So yes. You almost planned to come back. You expected to come back. Absolutely. I don't think it occurred to any of us that we wouldn't be back within a few months, maybe a year at the most.

Presenter22:55

You always plan

Presenter23:04

After you'd arrived you were reunited with your father and the family settled in Cambridge in a flat in one of the theological colleges. You got a full bursary to study at a Christian boarding school in Bedfordshire.

Presenter23:17

How did you manage to adjust to life in the UK?

Guli Francis-Dehqani23:20

It was a real culture shock. Although I spoke English, my English was rusty. I wasn't that comfortable using it. But, you know, I suddenly had opportunities that I'd never had before and I I was really keen to grab those opportunities. I got involved in the music and the drama and the sport and so on. I was much more interested in those things really than the academic stuff. So yeah, it became the springboard from which the rest of my life developed in this country.

Presenter23:45

Yeah. And by nineteen eighty nine, you graduated from Nottingham University with a music degree, then worked as a sound engineer for the BBC. How did that more spiritual path that you took after that develop?

Guli Francis-Dehqani24:00

Yeah, I think as I was growing up in my late teens, I kind of tried, I think, to leave all of that behind and walk away from faith, but I just couldn't quite do it. I was a bit rubbish at it, really, and it kept drawing me back. But it wasn't until later, in my late 20s, after I'd got married, that I was at a bit of a crossroads. I'd left the BBC in order to move out of London with my husband, who was training to be ordained. And I had assumed that this would now be the opportunity to have children, and that wasn't happening. And so I was beginning to wonder, well, if I never have children, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? And so I didn't really have a Damascus Road experience. I was also doing my doctorate studies on the role of, particularly of women missionaries in Iran and the cross-section of feminist theology into faith studies. And the more I learned and the more I studied about my homeland and Iran, the bigger the gap felt, the inability to go back almost became like an ache, a physical ache. I remember, I mean, it was a very, very painful time in many respects. And for me, I was very, very fortunate and blessed that everything worked out well. But I remember a sense of a determination that however painful this is, I've got to and I will find a positive way through. It's time for your next disc. What have you chosen?

Guli Francis-Dehqani25:27

So this is for my husband really and it would remind me of him. My husband's from Ireland and he is a huge Sinead O'Connor fan and I've chosen a track called Take Me to Church which also reminds me that religion and the church which should be a place of healing sadly often causes a lot of hurt as well.

Speaker 325:50

Oh, take me to church. I've done so many bad things that hurts. Yeah, take me to church, but not the ones that hurt. Cause that ain't the truth, and that's not what it's for. Yeah, take me to church, oh, take me to church, I've done so many bad things, it hurts.

Presenter26:20

Sinead O'Connor, and take me to church. Cully Francis De Carney, you were the first woman from an ethnic minority background to be ordained as an Anglican bishop in the UK. What did that mean to you personally?

Guli Francis-Dehqani26:33

Well, it came from left field really, and yet in a very strange way, it made sense. I had this feeling that it was clearly not about what I'd done in terms of experience in the church. It was about my life experiences and what that might have to contribute now within the context of the Church of England. So I kind of feel I represent something way beyond myself and a sense in which It's symbolic of pulling something from the boundaries into the middle, you know, this small, tiny Anglican community in the middle of nowhere. Through me now, kind of almost at the heart of the establishment here. It's bizarre, it still surprises me, but I feel that quite strongly and I feel a sense of responsibility with it. Also, for the if I can put it like this, for the Church of England, we have lots to learn from persecuted smaller Christian communities. And I hope that partly through my story I'm able to weave those threads together.

Presenter27:39

Your parents have lived long and happy lives in in the UK and are buried together near Winchester Cathedral. Now I know that you and your sisters thought long and hard about what to put on their gravestone.

Presenter27:51

Can you tell me what you were trying to capture?

Guli Francis-Dehqani27:55

In the later years of his life, when my father began to think about the fact that actually the likelihood was he was going to die in this country, he was very keen to find a plot of ground somewhere where he could be buried. In Islam, cremation is kind of anathema, so he wanted a burial place. And so he asked the then bishop and the dean of the cathedral whether there was an open churchyard anywhere in the diocese where he could have a plot. And extraordinarily, they came back with this very generous offer. They said, You can't be buried in your own diocese, so you can be buried here. And we wanted to capture something of the fact that they had been aliens, strangers in this land, and yet found a place of belonging, so that the Bible verse and the line of poetry that we've chosen reflect those themes.

Presenter28:45

What does it say?

Guli Francis-Dehqani28:46

no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens in the household of God. They're always very much with me in spirit, and I miss them I miss them hugely.

Presenter28:58

It's time for some more music. Go Leo's seventh choice today. What are we going to hear next?

Presenter29:03

Uh

Guli Francis-Dehqani29:04

This is Sovereign Light Cafe by Keen. They have become a favourite of us as a family, I guess, and this track in particular will remind me of Family Holidays, driving in the car with this blaring at full volume, all of us singing along. We went to see them perform live open air just as we were coming out of lockdown, actually, and hoping that they would play this piece, and they didn't, and they didn't, and they didn't, until they offered it as an encore right at the end.

Speaker 329:33

Go down to the rides on East Parade By the lights of the Palace Arcade And watch night coming down on the sovereign light cafe

Speaker 329:49

I'm begging you for some sign, but you still got nothing to say. Don't turn your back on me, don't walk away. I'm a better man now than I was that day.

Speaker 129:59

And I walked in.

Speaker 330:04

Let's go!

Presenter30:05

Keen and Sovereign Light Cafe. Gully Francis De Carney, in 2019 you led a service in Farsi at Wakefield Cathedral. It was a historic moment, the first authorized Persian translation of the Church of England's liturgy. What did that?

Guli Francis-Dehqani30:20

Mean to you.

Guli Francis-Dehqani30:21

Wakefield Cathedral, it's not a huge cathedral, but it's a big building and it was jam-packed full of Iranians, many of them young men, I mean standing room only. And it was profoundly moving and both an experience that took me back to my childhood, but also a recognition that this is kind of a new manifestation. And so some of what I would have remembered and would have been familiar to me, I have to just let it go. There's no good clinging on to the past. New life only comes sometimes when some things die and are let go of.

Speaker 130:50

Let it

Presenter31:00

When you're trying to make sense of a story as enormous as yours, as amazing as yours, how do you manage to strike that balance of processing what's happened and then going, okay, and now I'm going to put that aside and go forward?

Guli Francis-Dehqani31:13

There is much in my past that I'm proud of. It's shaped me, it's made me who I am. And there are also painful, difficult bits, but none of it defines me and I try to be open to new experiences, new understandings, new ways of learning, and new ways of being.

Presenter31:28

I'm glad that you're open to new experiences because you're about to have one. I'm about to cast you away to your desert island.

Presenter31:36

What do you think the first thing you'll do when you get there will be?

Guli Francis-Dehqani31:41

Well, probably if I've been shipwrecked, relief that I've

Guli Francis-Dehqani31:45

that I found dry land. We'll give you a soft landing, don't we? Great. I'm quite happy in my own company. I think for a while I'll quite enjoy it. Time to think and reflect and pull together all all the different threads that have made up my life so far.

Presenter32:01

Well

Guli Francis-Dehqani32:02

One

Presenter32:02

Or piece of music.

Guli Francis-Dehqani32:03

Before we send you there, what's your final choice today?

Guli Francis-Dehqani32:07

This is a singer that I came across several years ago, my own namesake actually, she's called Gulnar Shahiar. She combines Persian poetry and this one which is called The Fish in English, Mahi, is probably by the most famous and influential twentieth century poet in Iran called Ahmad Shamlu. But Gulnar Shahiar, she combines the Persian poetry and melody in a sense with contemporary jazz influences, with African Caribbean rhythms, and she seems to me to express something of my desire to find my own voice, to make something positive out of a feeling of not quite belonging.

Speaker 332:55

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Speaker 132:55

But I

Speaker 332:58

Ushayain Shurstore

Speaker 333:09

Chandler has all

Presenter33:15

Mahi by Gona Shahia

Presenter33:18

So, Gully Francis de Carney, I'm going to send you away to the island now. I'll give you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take another book with you. What would you like?

Guli Francis-Dehqani33:29

So I've chosen to take with me the Shah Naumeh, which in English is the Book of Kings. This is a seminal work within the canon of Persian literature. It's a 10th century epic poem by the famous Persian poet called Ferdo Si, and it tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran or Persia. And it combines myth and legend and history. I grew up knowing some of the stories, but I've never read it. So this would give me the opportunity to do that. I think my Persian is now quite rusty, so I would be helped by an English translation alongside, which would both help me improve my Persian again and also fully follow this amazing poem. Well, it's yours. You can also take a luxury item. What would you like? I'd like to take my photograph albums. I'm a great lover of printing out my photos and putting them into albums, so it would make me feel connected to those that I've left behind. And also, if I had a supply of blank albums, I'd have the time to catch up over the past few years. Many photos have been left still out of the album.

Presenter34:40

Oh, yet to be organised.

Guli Francis-Dehqani34:41

No, it would give me a project as well.

Presenter34:43

And finally, which one track of the eight that you shared with us today would you rush to save from the waves?

Guli Francis-Dehqani34:49

Really tough, but probably Foray's Requiem. It's the soundtrack that's punctuated many points of my life.

Guli Francis-Dehqani34:57

Bishop Gully Francis De Carney, thank you very much.

Presenter34:59

For letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you very much for having me.

Presenter35:19

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Gully. I'm glad she sees the island as a place for reflection. We've cast away many spiritual leaders, including Lord Indigit Singh, Dr. Jonathan Sachs, and Justin Welby. You can find these episodes in our Desert Island Discs programme archive and through BBC Sounds. The studio manager for today's programme was Emma Hart, the assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky, and the producer was Paula McGinley. The series editor is John Gowdy. Next time, my guest will be the cellist Sheku Kenne Mason. I do hope you'll join us.

Speaker 136:02

Hello, I'm Dr. Michael Mosley and in my BBC Radio 4 podcast, Just One Long Thing, I'm meeting the world's leading experts to discuss the best ways to live well. From talking to strangers to boost happiness to aging disgracefully to live longer.

Speaker 136:20

I'll be learning the top tips that the experts swear by to maximise your health and well-being. And as this is a just one thing special, I'll end each interview by asking our expert to choose the one personal health hack that they would say is the single most effective way you can improve your life.

Speaker 136:41

To benefit your brain and body in ways you might not expect, here's one thing you can do right now. Subscribe to the podcast on BBC Sounds.