Shuhada’/Sinéad

‘They tried to bury me. They didn’t realise I was a seed.’

Shuhada’ Sadaqat/Sinéad O’Connor

after Dinos Christianopoulos

In the dream factory farm of the Western pop music industry, women singer-songwriters with siren voices who are also anti-racist activists, gender non-conformists, emotional lightning rods and fountains of love are golden needles in a haystack. Such a precious needleworker was the Irish musical artist Shuhada’ Sadaqat/Sinéad O’Connor, who reverted to Islam in 2018 but continued to record, publish, and perform under her birth name until her premature death at the age of 56 in July 2023. A global superstar in her early twenties, Sinéad/Shuhada’ (as she was known to sign emails) was never forgiven in some quarters for dramatically rejecting this conventional success, and tributes in the British mainstream media were either lacking or insulting to her memory. But she knew that her true fans were not starstruck by her phenomenal voice or captivating looks but were ‘on my level’, as she put it in an early interview, people who related to the vulnerability, passion, and political anger she expressed in her work. These fans are legion: on social media her loss provoked an outpouring of grief and a slate of insightful eulogies, mourning the loss of a riveting artist, a powerful voice of protest, a modest and private benefactor to many, a proud single mother, and a courageous role model who spoke openly about her many physical and mental health difficulties. But while much has been said lately about how Shuhada’ Sadaqat used her high profile to shine a light on social and political ills, often well ahead of her time, she has not yet been given enough credit as a theologian.

That neglect is no doubt partly because mainstream journalists do not want or know how to engage with her Muslim beliefs. But also because in a secular, individualist society, a celebrity’s political views and psychological condition are of far more interest than her spiritual beliefs. Sinéad/Shuhada’ spoke out about the vicious abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her mother, who died in a car accident when the singer was eighteen. At the age of twenty-four, at the height of global fame, she was overnight shunned by the music industry for protesting, on live American television, systemic child abuse in the Catholic church. Having also earlier refused a Grammy, on the grounds that the award was for ‘shifting units’ not artistic merit, she forged a career outside the mainstream, producing eight more highly regarded, if not commercially supersonic albums, enabling her to raise her four children on her own. But it was not an easy road. 

Over the last twenty years Sister Shuhada’/Sinéad also lost a protracted custody battle and suffered poor physical and mental health, contending with fibromyalgia and a radical hysterectomy for which she was not given the necessary hormone treatment, flinging her into surgical menopause on which she blamed her suicidal feelings of the time. She was given medication for a misdiagnosis of bipolar condition – for symptoms that may have been related to her childhood abuse and/or a head injury she sustained as a teenager, when she was hit by a train door, opened seemingly as a lark by a boy on a passing train as she stood on a station platform. In recent years, she fluctuated between spells of immense creativity and long periods in rehab for a three-decade marijuana habit and in mental health asylums, treating what was also diagnosed as complex post-traumatic stress condition or borderline personality disorder. 

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