Cat Stevens was drowning. As a strong tide threatened to sweep the pop star
out to sea at Malibu, California, in 1976, he shouted: “Oh God! If you save
me I will work for you.” Suddenly a wave pushed him back to safety and
within a year he had become Britain’s most famous Muslim convert, Yusuf
Islam.
Last week he found himself out of his depth again and “totally shocked” when
the FBI diverted his airliner’s flight in mid-Atlantic and denied him entry
to the United States before putting him on a plane back to London.
Islam, it seems, had been on a “watch list” since his last visit to America in
May and was detained on “national security grounds” as a possible accomplice
to terrorists. He said he did not know whether to laugh or growl. The Muslim
Council of Britain protested that his treatment was “a slap in the face of
sanity”.
So complete was the self-effacement of Cat Stevens that it is hard to recall
what a huge influence he was in the 1960s and 1970s. As a teenage pop idol
and then a singer-songwriter, he had a distinctive voice and style that sold
50m albums.
Like Buddy Holly, he possessed a talent for churning out brilliant, poignant
hits that stayed in the charts for weeks, including Matthew and Son, Wild
World and Moonshadow. His version of the hymn Morning Has Broken became
almost compulsory at weddings.
The serious, bearded figure with a pudding-basin fringe photographed at
Heathrow last week was a far cry from the faddish, troubled youth who
indulged in the traditional excesses of rock stars. He admitted taking
drugs, including LSD.
Now 56, he lives in Kilburn, north London, with his wife Fouzia Ali and his
family. He has raised five children in the Muslim faith. His eldest
daughter, 24, was married three years ago in an arranged union.
Perhaps last week’s drama was payback time for a singer who walked away from a
glittering career to denounce his songs as akin to blasphemy. He became
associated with a fundamentalist outlook that transformed him from a dreamy
troubador, worshipped by teenage girls, into an increasingly humourless and
intolerant dogmatist.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence community
“has come into possession of recent information that raises concerns against
him”. This probably meant someone had turned up Islam’s old rap sheet,
beginning in 1988 when he allegedly supported the fatwa against Salman
Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses.
Fans and musicians responded angrily to tabloid headlines such as “Kill
Rushdie, says Cat Stevens”. In protest, the American band 10,000 Maniacs
withdrew their cover version of his song Peace Train from their album.
The artist formerly known as Cat Stevens later explained that he had simply
been invited to endorse a letter campaign requesting the book’s publisher to
withdraw support. “They ignored the plea,” he said. “Suddenly the media
tried linking me to supporting the latest fatwa. The fact is I never
supported the fatwa.”
He was forced into denial mode again four years ago when he was deported
within hours of arriving in Israel amid claims that he had delivered funds
to Hamas, the militant Islamic group, during a 1988 visit to the country.
Islam declared that he had “never knowingly supported any terrorist group —
past, present or future”.
Recently he admitted he had become too partisan, citing Muhammad Ali as
another Muslim convert whose radicalism was tempered by time. “There’s
always a zealous period,” he said. “I used to want to rebel against
everything, and that was great. After that, you get back to the job of
living.”
Indeed, he became a model of moderate Islam and something of a national
treasure. Hence a rebuff from Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, to his
American counterpart Colin Powell, that last week’s action against Islam
“should not have been taken”.
Islam was extremely vocal in his condemnation of the September 11 bombings in
New York and Washington, affirming his duty to make clear that such acts of
“incomprehensible carnage” had nothing to do with Islamic belief. He also
spoke out against other recent terrorist outrages.
Besides working tirelessly for Muslims, he has used the considerable proceeds
from his music career to establish three single-faith Islamic schools in
north London. In 1998 one of them, Islamia primary, became the first Islamic
school to join the state sector. He denied that such schools were
encouraging separatism. “They’re building bridges because Islam has a better
model than any other religion of being able to live with other cultures,” he
argued.
He was born Steven Demetre Georgiou, the youngest of three children, in 1948.
(He adopted the name Cat when a girlfriend told him his eyes were feline.)
His Greek Cypriot father and Swedish mother ran a restaurant, the Moulin
Rouge, in Soho and the family lived upstairs.
The religious influences around him were confusing. His father was strict
Greek Orthodox, his mother came from a Baptist background and he attended a
Roman Catholic school in nearby Drury Lane.
Growing up in the 1960s, his sister Anita’s collection of Sinatra and Gershwin
records vied for his attention with his brother David’s discs by the Everly
Brothers and Buddy Holly.
At 15 he persuaded his father to buy him a guitar and, after failing to form a
group, he embarked on a solo career, making his debut at a pub while still a
student at Hammersmith art college in 1964.
The following year he sold a song for £30 that was to become a massive hit for
PP Arnold. It was called The First Cut is the Deepest, since recorded by
countless performers, notably Rod Stewart. Another called Here Comes My Baby
was a hit for the Tremeloes.
His own recording career started in 1966 when he signed to Decca and produced
I Love My Dog, which reached number 28 in the charts. The follow-up single,
Matthew and Son, became a classic that launched his career, reaching number
two in the charts.
Just after his 19th birthday, a nagging cough that he attributed to his
hedonistic lifestyle was diagnosed as tuberculosis and he spent three months
in hospital. During a nine-week convalescence at home, he began to reflect
on his life. “I became aware of my own mortality and the inevitability of
death. A lot of important questions came into my mind,” he recalled.
He dabbled in Zen Buddhism, Taoism, numerology and astrology. He spoke of his
belief in UFOs and began carrying a staff called Amberthwiddle. His songs,
too, became deeper as he abandoned mainstream pop to produce a series of
albums that reflected his troubled state of mind.
Their phenomenal success pushed him into a year’s tax exile in Brazil, where
he donated the money he saved to Unesco. His real turning point came in
1976: shortly after his near-drowning experience in Malibu, his brother
bought him a copy of the Koran. Then, after a pilgrimage to Mecca, he
renounced his former life and assumed a new name.
He later admitted he had been “a bit hasty” in junking his music, believing
mistakenly that music was forbidden in Islam. He also acknowledged his fans’
feelings of betrayal. “There was a breaking of a connection between souls
and that was the biggest sadness to me.”
Last year he made a comeback of sorts with a Greatest Hits album, a charity
concert at the Albert Hall — his first for 25 years — and an appearance at
Nelson Mandela’s Aids benefit concert.
Now there is talk of a West End musical based on his hits. “I’m very excited
about it,” he said earlier this year. “We aim to open in Germany in 2005
before hopefully bringing it to London.” It will be more like the
biographical Buddy than shows built around hits by Abba, Queen and Rod
Stewart, he said.
Perhaps, with a nod to Buddy Holly, the musical should be named after Cat
Stevens’s moment of epiphany — The Day the Music Died.
