RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Marzieh, who was the first lady of music in Iran, has died at age 86. The renowned singer became a symbol of resistance against the post-revolutionary regime of Islamic fundamentalist.

Generations of Iranians admired her interpretation of more than 1,000 songs, which combine nostalgia for the country’s traditional culture with a passion for contemporary issues. Love songs were her speciality, performed in a winding, sinuous style.

She did not perform publicly in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 — the mullahs banned solo female singers — and to keep her voice in shape would leave her village outside Tehran, walk into the desert under cover of darkness and sing alongside a roaring waterfall. “Nobody could hear me,” she recalled, “I sang to the stars and the rocks.”

With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, she was offered the chance to resume her career, but with the proviso that she sang only to women. She refused, explaining that “I have always sung only for all Iranians.”

Offered concert dates in the United States in 1984, Marzieh again refused, saying she wanted to sing only in her native land, but she later relented and in 1994 left Iran for a life in exile in France.

“The mullahs tried to get me to sing for them, but I refused, so they said I could not sing for anyone,” she said. “It ate at my heart. A canary dies if it is incarcerated. That would have been my fate if I had not found the feathers to fly.”

In Paris, she joined the political coalition of the controversial National Council of Resistance of Iran , and became an arts adviser to Maryam Rajavi, the self-styled president-elect of Iran.

Marzieh’s concerts from this point became increasingly political, with critics suggesting that she was little more than a puppet of the Leftist opposition MEK movement, which is affiliated to the NCRI and remains classified as a terror organization by the United States. Nonetheless she performed in concert venues around the world, and for many European heads of state, including the Queen and former French president Charles de Gaulle.

In 1995, to the dismay of Islamic fundamentalists, she became the first Iranian woman to record the Muslim call to prayer.

Marzieh subsequently spent several years living among Iranian dissidents at the Ashraf refugee camp in Iraq.

She gave her final performance in Paris in 2006.

Marzieh, who died Oct. 13, was twice married and is survived by a son. Her daughter died last year.