Yusuf Islam supposedly personifies the idea that there's no fun in fundamentalism. Yet on the one occasion I met him in the flesh, he seemed a rather genial fellow. It was April 1994 and the UCD Islamic Society had invited him over to Belfield campus to give a talk on Islam and why he had embraced it 17 years before. For Yusuf Islam in a previous life was Cat Stevens, the pop balladeer, who in an even more previous life was Stephen Dimitri Georghiu, the introverted son of a Greek-Cypriot entertainer.
His once Che Guevara-like beard was straggly and streaked with grey; the trademark mane of soft curls was hidden beneath a Muslim prayer cap. Yet if he had sported a denim shirt instead of a colourless cardigan and added a few beads and bangles, Cat would have been onstage again. Well, perhaps not. Cat Stevens is dead; he has been since late 1977, when the crooner responsible for Moonshadow and Wild World dropped out of a world tour, turned his back on the music industry and bowed in the direction of Mecca.
Rushdie fatwah
Yusuf Islam weaves a perplexing moral maze on the themes of order, justice and existence. On the podium, the sincerity of the convert cannot be faulted. But he refused to talk about his controversial stance on the 1989 fatwah issued against Salman Rushdie. However, after his talk he brushed off the great and the good to talk to anyone with a query. He has travelled to Dublin several times, visiting the mosques at South Circular Road and Clonskeagh. On Gay Byrne's radio show some time ago, he was surprisingly generous to Boyzone's indifferent cover version of his song Father and Son.
Yusuf Islam is now returning to the profession he once so wholeheartedly renounced. He is producer of a new album, I Have No Cannons That Roar, and sings on one track, The Little Ones, an elegy for the dead children of Bosnia and Dunblane. Part of the profits go to Bosnian charities and part of the album's theme, redemption in a harsh world, would not be misplaced in his pre-1977 songs. But he won't be strumming his guitar again - stringed instruments are outlawed by some Muslims.
Britain's Islamic community found an exotic and unlikely champion in Yusuf Islam. From the start he established that he was made of sterner stuff than George Harrison, the wannabe Indian mystic, or born-again Bob Dylan. The music industry was Godless and corrupt, he declared, and he was dedicating himself henceforth to the laws of the Koran.
Muslim schools
Lobbying tirelessly for years for Muslim schools, he pestered Brent Council and the Thatcher government. The first school opened in 1983, to be followed by three more and state aid for infants. (Britain's Muslim community has, by the way, often pointed approvingly at the Irish government's subsidy of a Muslim school.
Meanwhile Yusuf Islam had married Fawzia Ali in September 1979 at the Regent's Park Mosque in London and settled down to raising a family. Is he mellowing with age? His new work suggests that he may no longer be disowning Cat with the same vehemence.
The Greek Orthodox boy grew up in London's West End and hit the music scene in 1966 with the album Tea for the Tillerman and a No. 2 single, Matthew and Son. At 25, he was a millionaire, had a cult following and a glamorous girlfriend, the actress Patti D'Arbanville, who left him for Don Johnson.
Promise to God
A string of best-selling albums followed, the tunes centring on the search for salvation and meaning in a perplexing world. Typically, they were melodious and melancholy; young Cat was unhappy and confused. They also charted his trawl through a plethora of Oriental creeds. His turning moment came while swimming one day when he was swept out of his depth and was about to drown. He promised to devote his life to God if he was saved; then a wave pulled him to safety.
In 1975, while recuperating from an illness, his brother, back from a trip to the Middle East, gave him a Koran and a servant of Allah was born.
The press, rebuffed by his official line: "Cat Stevens is no more and that's all there is to say," have painted him as a humourless fundamentalist, dour and dogmatic.
His sense of mission is no less resolute than ever and the new album is really an affirmation of this. However, for the first time in 20 years he is again a minstrel.