Linda Thompson and Richard Thompson/Getty Images
Qalam strives to explore the interpenetration of different cultures. To this end, we have decided to launch a series of playlists in which music mediates between different geographical and ideological spaces. Our first playlist is called ‘West to East: One Hundred Best Songs’. It will be updated several times a week, and its curation will focus on how Western pop culture has reflected the realities of the East, whether they are musical, geographical, religious, or political. (The terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ should be taken as broadly and arbitrarily as possible.)
A former member of the seminal British folk band Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson converted to Islam in 1974 and moved with his wife Linda to live in a Sufi community in London. The following year they released their first post-conversion album, Pour Down Like Silver. The situation was tricky, because on the one hand the mullah forbade Thompson to play electric guitar (which would have been a problem for the man who would later be listed among the best guitarists in the world), and on the other hand the contract for an album with Island Records was already signed. As a result, the parties came to a compromise, reasoning that as long as the music (a very important element in the Sufi tradition) on the album was dictated by love for the Almighty, then in such a context even lines like "drink the wine, the wine of lovers" were acceptable (the image is actually quite in line with Sufi poetics). It has to be said that Thompson's religious conversion didn't affect his arrangements too much — for example, note the ballad Night Comes In, which, if you don't know the background, sounds like a great example of Anglo-Saxon folk-rock of the 1970s. So, as Idries Shah writes in his monograph on Sufism, “the Sufi life can be lived at any time, in any place. It does not require withdrawal from the world… It has profoundly influenced both the East and the very bases of the Western civilisation.”