As Cat Stevens, he helped define the singer-songwriter. After converting to Islam, he became a lightning rod. His new memoir explores it all.
The third time Yusuf Islam, then known best as the singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, almost died, he didn’t tell anyone.
His first near-death experience had been as a gallivanting teen, when he slipped while jumping between British rooftops, only to be caught by his best friend an instant before the plummet. His second had come at 20, when doctors diagnosed him, then a pinup pop star, with tuberculosis after he began coughing blood onto his piano.
Late in 1975, soon after Islam turned 27, his career seemed to be flagging. While he waited for lunch with his manager and label boss in Malibu, California, he decided to swim in the Pacific. After 15 minutes in the cold water, he tried to head back, only to find that the current was sweeping him to sea.
“I thought I could swim well, but I could not fight or beat the ocean. I had only seconds left,” Islam, 77, said recently during a video interview from a rented London apartment. So he prayed, insisting that, if he lived, he would work for God. A wave pushed him forward. “When I realised my vulnerability, what else could I do? My body was disappearing. I had only my soul left.”
Islam had been a spiritual seeker since his tuberculosis battle, reading Buddhist studies like The Secret Path and flirting with numerology and yoga in a quest to answer what he called “serious, serious questions about your existence”. A few months after he nearly drowned, his older brother, David, gave him a copy of the Quran after being struck by the serenity inside a Jerusalem mosque. As soon as the musician read the first few pages, he knew he had found the way to fulfil his prayer’s promise.
“If I was doing a tour, I would be in my hotel room, door locked and reading,” he said. “I knew the impact this would have, but I wasn’t worried. I was too interested in my soul.”
The gift precipitated one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest disappearing acts. In 1977, he converted to Islam; in 1978, he legally changed his name from Steven Georgiou to Yusuf Islam and made his last album as Cat Stevens, a perfunctory farewell called Back to Earth. Suspended in the tension between his past life and new faith, he would not make another album with instruments other than drums for nearly 30 years.
But Islam has previously admitted he could have handled his exit better, that he didn’t understand how meaningful and motivating anthems like Peace Train, Father and Son or Moonshadow had been, or how disappointing his musical disappearance might be. One of his songs was in Steve Jobs’ list of 10 inspiring tunes, alongside Bob Dylan and Johann Sebastian Bach; he has influenced six decades of songwriters searching for a little truth amid the sort of fetching melodies that sound as though they’ve always existed.
“This guy is better than Paul Simon,” whispered a smiling Art Garfunkel while inducting Islam into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. “He put a huge building block in the proud edifice of rock ’n’ roll.”
Islam is now trying to explain himself – the inspirations for those early staples; his religious conversion and the relief he found there; his charitable work for Palestinians and advocacy for Muslim children in England; his clumsy comments regarding a fatwa on Salman Rushdie; why he had the wherewithal to return to music despite those who insist his religion forbids it.
After nearly 35 years of contemplating an autobiography, even abandoning several chapters of a draft written in the early ’90s, Islam has finished the voluminous, funny and candid Cat on the Road to Findout, out the start of October. (A hits compendium, also released this month, shares that name.) It is a trove of intimate anecdotes and a tranche of enthusiasms and regrets, all outlining the rationales behind his most controversial moments.
“The first spiritual book I read was The Secret Path. And in the Quran, some of the first words you read are, ‘Guide us to the straight path.’ It’s all to do with the path,” he said, chuckling beneath a thin white beard. “There are some crooked paths, for sure, but they’re all paths towards something higher, ultimately divine. I just keep going.”
In June 1981, Islam sold almost all of his musical gear and career ephemera at Bonhams, a London auction house. He let a longtime roadie keep the white piano that had once been a prized possession, and divvied his £40,000 ($92,000) in profit between two charities. During his first three years as a Muslim, he had wrestled with the contentious notion that the faith forbade making music. A religious tract from South Africa finally convinced him it was. “It scared the absolute hell out of me,” he says in Findout.
But in 2002, Islam’s only son, Muhammad, went to college in London and bought a black Yamaha guitar. He’d long been interested in rock, even stunning his father by putting on a Metallica cassette during a trip to Kosovo as a teenager, playing Die, Die My Darling in a war zone. He sneaked his instrument to a family vacation in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
“I knew it was going to be a thing for my dad to find out about the guitar,” Muhammad said from a London practice space. “He came into my room and said, ‘Wow, you’ve got a guitar?’ He picked it up and played some chords.”
Muhammad’s younger sister, Aminah, requested The Laughing Apple, a song she knew from Islam’s 1967 album New Masters. It was the first time they heard their famous father, who had helped define the very image of the guitar-strumming singer-songwriter, sing while playing. “My guitar wasn’t in my room that night. He’d taken it,” Muhammad said. “The next day, he’d written a song. That’s how quick it was.”
Islam had already been nibbling around the edges of a return to music for a decade. He recorded The Life of the Last Prophet in 1995, mixing spoken-word readings with drum-backed renditions of traditional nasheeds, a type of Muslim hymn. He started a record label, Mountain of Light, and was delighted when The Life of the Last Prophet became a hit in the Muslim world. More albums followed, including a children’s LP of Islamic songs in English, recorded in South Africa.
His son’s clandestine guitar proved the catalyst for his next two acts. Islam has since recorded a half-dozen albums, shared a track with Dolly Parton and Paul McCartney and helped oversee multiple compilations and 50th-anniversary boxed sets of landmark albums like Tea for the Tillerman and Mona Bone Jakon.
“Explaining things is a dry way of communicating,” Islam said. “I’m in my best element when I’m actually singing my heart out.”
Islam’s relaunched music career led him to advocate for his own interpretation of his faith, too. He had decided early into his study that he was not going to choose a sect of Sunni Islam. (“I didn’t see any borders. I go back to unity.”) And he gradually grew to understand that he did not need to adhere to someone else’s hard-line understanding of God to remain faithful. There was enough debate about music in Islam, he felt, that he could play it again and keep his soul safe. His 2014 book, Why I Still Carry a Guitar, was his direct explanation to the Muslim community. That process led him to write Cat on the Road to Findout.
“There were some threats coming from the jurisprudence sections of the Muslim community – ‘It’s dangerous stuff to be out there, boasting of your talents and showing yourself off,’” he said, sighing. “But my art was something much deeper than that.”
When he was a child in Catholic school in London, Islam asked a nun, Sister Anthony, what might have been his first existential question: “When do the angels start writing down your sins?”
After a pause, she told him that the scorecard began when children turned 8, a relief since he was still a year or so away. “Religion constantly made me feel guilty about nice-looking things,” he writes in his book. “But balancing those kinds of fearful images with what was going on outside the doors of the church after school, I felt the pull of the world mighty overpowering.”
That tension has framed the past 70 years of Islam’s life, as he has toggled between celebrity and charity, between being reclusive and outspoken, between his very names. (His last three albums have been issued as “Yusuf/Cat Stevens.”) He shoulders some of the blame for several mistakes in Findout, like his repeated remarks about Rushdie’s potential death in 1989 and his failure to renounce a fatwa against the author, or his repeated romantic jealousy and coldness as a young man. He celebrates his victories, too, like securing Government funding for his Islamic schools or his efforts to stave off the Gulf War through “peace camps,” even if they failed.
“I’m going to start quoting the Quran, but God created death and life in order to test you. In capitalistic terms, there’s a payday,” he said. “That could be good or bad, depending on what you did. It’s an expression of karma, because what you do is going to have an effect. If you sum up the ultimate effect of your life, that’s what we should be working toward: raising that value.”
Islam sees Israel’s continued attacks in the Gaza Strip as one such global test. He has been accused of supporting Hamas since 1988, a false association he says caused him American visa trouble as late as 2006. (He insists his 2004 deportation, on the other hand, stemmed from snubbing a personal meeting with President George W. Bush.) “It’s a watershed moment,” he said of the destruction in Gaza. “The new generation who sees this, they’re not going to forget about it.”
Islam likes to rib himself over how he acted as a young performer, bad at explaining himself in the press and perhaps even worse at telling stories onstage. He realises now that he was a kid who didn’t know very much about anything, and that, as he began to back away from his career and its fame, he was finally able to learn enough to go back to it.
“I was looking for answers, and a lot of that was in the music. When I found what I was looking for, it shouldn’t have surprised people that I might not need to write so many songs anymore,” he said. “It became easier for me when I’d learned something I could stand upon, that was solid. If you’ve managed to grab the truth, you feel much more confident in talking about it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Grayson Haver Currin
Photographs by: Max Miechowski
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