YUSUF AND ISLAM
A FACT SHEET
CHARITABLE WORK
Since converting to Islam and leaving the music business 28 years ago, Yusuf has channeled the royalties from his Cat Stevens records to charitable causes, including a string of Muslim schools he personally established in London. His pioneering work resulted in a landmark decision by the British government to certify and support Islamic education throughout the country.
His U.N. registered charity, Small Kindness, provides humanitarian relief to orphans and families in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and other regions. He is also one of the few individuals to finance women to attend university in Baghdad.
He donated the royalties from the Cat Stevens Box Set, released in October 2001, to charity – with half going to The September 11th Fund and the remainder to orphans and homeless families in underdeveloped countries.
CONTROVERSY – SALMAN RUSHDIE
Yusuf's celebrity has made him a media and government target. Over the years, his beliefs and actions have often been misunderstood and misrepresented. He accepts this as a reflection of how extremists on both sides have attempted to use Islam as a combatant in a global struggle.
Yusuf was not heard from in public for a decade until 1989, when it was erroneously reported that he supported the death sentence ordered by the Ayatollah Khomeini against novelist Salman Rushdie for writing "The Satanic Verses." It was what he calls a "monstrous myth":
Yusuf was speaking to students at a university in London about his journey to Islam when he was asked about the fatwa (Islamic legal pronouncement) calling for the death of Rushdie. “Of course, I was going to be a prime target for a question on this issue,” so he responded with a simple statement of what he understood at the time of Muslim law. “I was simply a new Muslim who had stated something which I considered quite plain and obvious. If you were to ask a Bible student what the Ten Commandments are, you would expect him to repeat them honestly, and you wouldn’t blame him for doing so…”
“What I said was that, like the Bible, the Koran defines blasphemy without repentance as being a capital offense. And that’s all I stated. I never supported the fatwa. It was very sad to see such irresponsibility from the 'free press' and I was totally abhorred. I released a statement the very next day after I read the headlines, completely contradicting what they’d said, but that never got the headlines. Of course, once the damage is done, everybody perceives you for what they’ve seen on the front page. It was a matter of me learning the hard way.”
CONTROVERSY – “NO-FLY” LIST
In September 2004, Yusuf was on a United Airlines flight from London to Washington when the plane was diverted to Maine because he had apparently been mistaken for someone on the post-9/11 "no fly" list. He was deported back to England the following day, and an international controversy was provoked. “It was like I was reading a script where I was the star, and I didn’t even know what the plot was and how it was going to end. Perhaps it was about the fact that my name happens to carry my religion with it.”
When The Sun and The Sunday Times in England published articles agreeing with the U.S.’s actions, Yusuf sued the newspapers for libel. He received a substantial settlement from both papers, along with published apologies and acknowledgements that he had never supported terrorism. He donated his settlement to help orphans of the Asian tsunami.
”It seems to be the easiest thing in the world these days to make scurrilous accusations against Muslims,” he said at the time. “In my case, it directly impacts my relief work and damages my reputation as an artist.”
“MAN FOR PEACE” AWARD
Acclaimed around the globe for his devotion to peace and charity, Yusuf has received a series of prestigious awards for his life's work. He was named as the 2004 “Man for Peace,” voted for by a committee of all Nobel peace laureates and presented by Mikhail Gorbachev
ISLAM AND PEACE
"It may come as news to some, but the word Islam itself derives from the word peace," Yusuf points out. "That is the heart and soul of the religion and is what I've always followed. Other horrendous events that have taken place mean that it's now necessary to educate people that this religion is based on spiritual love, unity, and tolerance. I think that I've made that journey, and perhaps I can help others to an understanding that the vast majority of Muslims simply want to live a good life and be at peace with the rest of the world. Today I am in a unique position as a looking glass through which Muslims can see the west and the west can see Islam, and it is important for me to be able to help bridge the cultural gaps others are sometimes frightened to cross.”
THE RETURN TO MUSIC
He has often been asked why he gave up music so completely and did not find a way to accommodate his faith and his career. “I gave an interview in 1980 to a Muslim magazine and they asked me about music and the future, and I said I'd suspended my musical activities for fear that it may divert me from the true path," he recalls. "But I also added that I couldn't be dogmatic and say I'll never make music again. There's nothing in the Koran that says music is forbidden; yet when I looked at the music business I realised it was definitely a negative infringement on what I wanted from my spiritual life. I didn't want to have to worry about it, so for me that meant giving away my guitars and getting down to the job of living, starting the charitable work I wanted to do, and having a family life."
Ultimately, he says, the reason for his return to pop music is simple. "The language of song is simply the best way to communicate the powerful winds of change which brought me to where I am today, and the love of peace still passing through my heart. I feel gifted to have that ability still within me. I never wanted to get involved in politics because that essentially separates people, whereas music has the power to unify, and is so much easier for me than to give a lecture."
BACKGROUND: HIS PATH TO ISLAM
Although Cat Stevens’s conversion to Islam and departure from making music 28 years ago took the world by surprise, it was actually the culmination of a decade-long spiritual quest. "To some people it may have seemed like an enormous jump," he says. "But for me it was a gradual dawning, and my songs had already primed me for it.”
In 1968, having already achieved pop stardom in his native UK, his career was suddenly derailed when he contracted tuberculosis. “Because I was close to death, I started to think more purposefully about the meaning of life and why we are here,” he says. “That was the beginning of my search for something beyond, that eventually led me on a long journey to find out."
Having spent a year in recovery, he returned to recording with a new introspection and sensitivity. Throughout his hugely successful career in the 1970s, “I was always seeking, and my songs reflect that very clearly," he says today. "I was looking beyond the surface of the material world and wanted to find some higher truth.”
A major turning point in his life came while he was swimming off the coast of Malibu, California. "I was in the ocean and suddenly I'd lost it, I had no power to swim any more," he remembers. "I was fighting the ocean and I had nobody with me. Yet I did have someone. I called out, 'God, if you save me I'll work for you.' A friendly wave swept me in to shore and from that arose within me a deep conviction and belief that there is a higher control over one's life."
In 1976 his brother gave him a copy of the Koran. "I began to read it and found a totally unique form of revelation in terms of the communication between God and man," he recalls. “Today what some people think about Islam is something completely different form what I discovered when I started reading the Koran. It was that final discovery of the Koran and the message it contained which brought me home and from that moment my thoughts and all the things I had been leading to made sense.”
