Shusha Guppy was for more than four decades a social magnet for fashionable London. Since she came over from Paris to marry the geographer and art dealer Nicholas Guppy in 1961, her occasional concerts, many albums and several books enriched the lives of a generation of cosmopolitan Londoners. Her warm voice and talent for melody, which she said “came from God”, mesmerised them, and her beauty and exoticism as a Muslim woman singing songs of love in half a dozen languages and proclaiming the essential oneness of all creeds fulfilled their ideological needs as the movers and shakers of multiculturalism, a movement now under some strain.

At her concerts, where she played the guitar to the accompaniment of a small orchestra, all hues of intellectual London came together. From philosophers including the atheist Sir Alfred Ayer and the religious Roger Scruton to the Bishop of Southwark and Lord Kilbracken, almost everyone described Guppy as a personal friend. Indeed, she had a special gift for friendship that sustained her to her last days dying from cancer. From all over Europe, friends came to her bedside to comfort her.

Guppy was born Shamsi Assar, six years before Iran's occupation by the Soviet Union and Britain during the Second World War. Her father, Mohammad Kazem, was a Muslim theologian who had been appointed Professor of Philosophy at the newly founded University of Tehran under the anti-clerical Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Shah had banned Muslim attire for women and occasionally humiliated some of the most prominent leaders of the theological schools of Shia Islam in Iran by flogging them in public. As a result, the professor was seen as a collaborator by some of his old friends. Shamsi adored him. Uncharacteristically for his class at that time, Kazem admired Western civilisation and sent his children to the French lycée for their education.

At secondary school, Shamsi won a scholarship to Paris and went there at 17 to study oriental languages, but found herself conquered by the romance of left-wing postwar Paris led by such Marxist figures as Louis Aragon and Jean-Paul Sartre. She trained as a singer and began to sing in nightclubs patronised by the fashionable and the rich. Encouraged by Jacques Prévert, she started recording Persian ballads, chansons and old French songs. It was at that time that she adopted an artistic name, Shusha, after the pre-Classical capital city of southern Iran.

But it was in London that her career as a singer and writer took off. Between 1971 and 2001 she brought out ten albums and several books, while at the same time working as the London editor of the American quarterly The Paris Review. Two of her books, The Blindfold Horse: Memories of a Persian Childhood (1988) and A Girl in Paris (1991) are especially memorable.

By the 1980s Guppy had turned away from her early left-wing mentors in Paris and even become antagonistic towards them. Instead, she found solace in Sufi Islam, a heterodox and often contradictory body of sages and doctrines that believes in the unity of all creeds and emphasises the essentiality of love in public affairs. She wrote and broadcast on the matter in Europe and America, saying that Sufism better expressed the spirit of Islam than did the creed's own official clerics. She made it an aim of her life to try to minimise the damage done to Islam by militants. Her last piece of journalism, dictated from her deathbed, detected the ancient Zoroastrian divine glimmer of Farr-e-Izadi in the Prince of Wales.

Guppy's marriage was dissolved in 1976. Thereafter, she lived modestly in a small flat in Chelsea where, though often short of money, she entertained her friends generously. A particularly painful time of her life was the imprisonment in the United States from 1993 to 1996 of her elder son, Darius, after he had been convicted of a jewellery fraud there.

She is survived by him and by her younger son.

Shusha (Shamsi) Guppy, singer and author, was born on December 24, 1935. She died on March 21, 2008, aged 72