Why yusuf islam is back to music

The news of its release has not, Islam says, been greeted with untrammelled delight in every section of the Muslim community: "It's creating heat - there are people pointing fingers at me, saying you shouldn't be doing this, but quite honestly they are not having an effect on anybody, and I'd much prefer to think that what I'm doing now with my little guitar is helping to make things better in the world. He is scrupulously polite, but clearly uncomfortable.

There is no mistaking his suspicion. He hints at a media conspiracy against Muslims. This was his wife's idea, he says, a means of combating his wariness of the press. It's easy to forget just how big Cat Stevens was, partly because he detached himself from music so completely after his conversion, and partly because his oeuvre has never undergone the critical re-evaluation afforded less commercially successful peers such as Nick Drake or John Martyn. He sold 50 million albums. His music was an inescapable presence even in primary schools, where no assembly was complete without one of the trendier teachers strapping on a guitar for a rendition of Morning Has Broken , the hymn Stevens popularised on his album Teaser And The Firecat.

Even at the height of his success, however, journalists found him heavy going in person. He complained of being "misinterpreted", but it's hard not to feel that most interviewers just didn't have a clue what he was going on about in his opaque pronouncements about everything from Maoism to UFOs. He eventually gave up interviews altogether and moved to Brazil for what was widely reported as a period of austere seclusion and meditation. Everybody had their pads on mountainsides, apartments with water flowing underneath them, an amazing lifestyle.

In Rio, you've got these shantytowns, and if there's a heavy rain, people lose their homes. So my conscience couldn't bear that either. The path to his conversion famously began with getting into difficulties while swimming off the coast of Malibu - Islam prayed to God and was swept back to shore.

His faith was sealed when his brother gave him an English translation of the Koran in , but it's hard not to come to the conclusion that he might have given up music even if spiritual enlightenment had not intervened. By the end of the '70s, the public's affection for sensitive singer-songwriters had begun to wane. His albums were still selling, but not in the kind of quantities they had earlier in the decade.

My adolescent soul despaired, knowing that there would be no more Cat Stevens albums, no more Cat Stevens concerts. The man who had become a hero to me had long since retired from the music world. In time, his music, too, would fade from my consciousness.

As I grew and matured, so did my musical tastes and sensibilities. I was intrigued when he came out of retirement with the two Yusuf albums, and listened to each of them a handful of times with attendant hopes and it seemed inevitable disappointment. It was hard to get excited about his music now. The voice was the same, but the spirit was changed, different, unwelcoming. Nevertheless, when it was announced, in late , that he was going to perform in America for the first time in thirty-eight years, I put my misgivings aside and became a teen-ager again, queueing up for tickets on the phone the morning they went on sale.

I simply drove up to Boston to see my old hero, expectations dimmed to almost nothing. I imagined that there I would see Yusuf Islam, delivering a respectful program of his latter-day music, with perhaps one or two old favorites thrown in as crowd appeasement. I was going to pay homage to the singer whose music had once so inspired me, for the chance to simply be in the same room with him for the first and what I assumed would be the last time. It has taken some time for me to think clearly about what it was like to be at that show.

What happened there was more than just a good concert given by a group of well-rehearsed, talented musicians, backing a pop icon on a comeback tour, though it was partly that. It was more than just a nostalgic trip down memory lane, as a sold-out crowd sang along to songs that many including myself never expected to hear played live again, though it was partly that, too. Without resorting to hyperbole, being there, for me, was an unexpected catharsis, something like seeing a ghost.

Was he now acknowledging his former self? This was a surprise, the first of many that the evening would hold. What was this, though? And the stage set—it was elaborate, whimsical, evocative of the old Cat, whose tastes sometimes crossed the line into outright silliness.

Most significantly, though, he himself seemed engaged, connected, and—hardest to believe—lighthearted. Here he was again. More than at any other point since his return to secular music eight years ago, he looks like a rock star. Yusuf is relaxed and friendly, but everyone else seems a little on edge. His son anxiously looks up from his laptop when the conversation veers from music, and two publicists sit outside the door.

Yusuf recently wrapped his first North American tour since Georgiou came of age just as his hometown was becoming the center of the rock universe. Everything was in this small radius in the West End of London. Hearing Bob Dylan for the first time changed his life.

It was the era of the sensitive singer-songwriter, and Stevens fit right in on the airwaves next to James Taylor and Carly Simon. Even when he became a superstar, Stevens had a hard time enjoying himself — tuberculosis helped see to that. I became a vegetarian, and I carried around a suitcase full of vitamins and special drinks everywhere I went. Everything changed one day in , when Stevens went for a swim in the ocean near Malibu. As he tried to swim back to shore, he realized the current was too strong to fight, and after struggling for a time he found himself on the verge of drowning.

This was life-and-death. Not long afterward, his brother David gave him a copy of the Quran. I felt like I was discovering something that was an amazing and immense secret. Within two years, Cat Stevens had become Yusuf Islam. He devoted himself to Allah, deciding all forms of music were against the faith.