Yusuf Islam Explains Why He Stopped Singing After Conversion to Islam
“It was a hard tug. I felt a responsibility to my fans, but I would have been a hypocrite. I needed to get real. So I stopped singing and started taking action with what I now believed,” he said. The singer, who first performed as Cat Stevens, adopted the name Yusuf Islam when he changed faith. He now uses both first names.
Stevens said he had originally wanted to serve as a bridge between two great cultures, yet, while Islam welcomed its famous convert, Western audiences were hostile. “On the other side, people said, ‘He is a bit of a traitor’. He has ‘turned Turk’, if you like. So I was often used as a bit of a spokesman, and I was useful for certain occasions.”
The 72-year-old British musician, still internationally famous for songs such as Father and Son, The First Cut is the Deepest, Moonshadow and Wild World, said he had hoped fans would understand that he felt he had found something more important than music, but he was wrong, according to the Guardian.
“I thought, ‘Everybody should get this’, but it didn’t work out quite like that. Everyone wanted me to keep on making music.” Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday, the singer, who was born Steven Demetre Georgiou in London’s Soho to a Greek Cypriot father and a Swedish mother, also talked about the joy he felt when he decided to pick up his guitar again after 20 years.
“It was absolute magic. Having laid myself fallow for two decades, I was absolutely flowing with ideas. I knew it was right.”
The spiritual journey that led to Islam began with a serious bout of tuberculosis in his teens. In hospital in Midhurst in Sussex for three months, he started to read Buddhist literature. A few years later, his brother gave him a Quran and the Muslim teachings, alongside an episode in which he nearly drowned while swimming in the sea off Malibu, this took him to the point of conversion to Islam. “I would never have picked up a Quran. But it became the gateway. After a year I could not hold myself back. I had to bow down.”
Stevens emphasized the importance music has in his life once more. “It is a mystical thing still. It is something that permeates our emotion, our soul, sometimes our intellect. Our body moves to it. I didn’t know where I was going but music helped me to get there.”
Writing a popular song in his youth, Stevens admitted, was a conscious process. “I knew when I was writing a hit, and I was excited for other people to hear it. You have to be a fan of your own music, a fan of yourself, in a way.”
