A New Morning Has Broken

By the summer of 1975, Cat Stevens had it all. Since 1971 the singer had scored five U.S. Top 10 albums in a row, all international smashes, plus a host of hit singles--”Wild World,” “Moon Shadow,” “Morning Has Broken.” He had also won respect for his intelligent songwriting.

He was not unprepared for stardom. He was born in the heart of London’s show-biz district, and his childhood, he says, had shouted one message: “Make it!”

Ordinarily an American rather than British attitude, it came from being the son of a Greek Cypriot villager born poor but determined to work his way up and out no matter where it took him. Eventually, his father owned a restaurant. Whereas it seemed that Steven Georgiou, a.k.a. Cat Stevens, could own the world.

Then he took a swim at Malibu and nearly died.

“Without warning a strong current carried me out to sea,” he recalls. “My whole life flashed in front of me, as they say, but I knew someone was there and I said, ‘Oh God, if you help me I’ll work for you.’ Anyway, a wave came from behind me and gently pushed me towards the shore and then I had all the energy I needed to get back.”

Near-death proved the beginning of the end of Cat Stevens. Two years later, in 1977, he embraced the Muslim faith, changed his name to Yusuf Islam and rejected everything he had been before, symbolically auctioning his platinum discs for charity.

He disappeared from public view for a decade, reemerging in 1989 when it was reported that he had declared his support for the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa--death sentence--against British novelist Salman Rushdie for the allegedly sacrilegious content of “The Satanic Verses.”

Cat Stevens had seemed a nice hippie sort of chap, but overnight, he became such a hated figure that Los Angeles radio personality Tom Leykis drove a steamroller over a pile of his records.

Now, though, one of the rock ‘n’ roll era’s strangest stories opens a new chapter. Cat Stevens is making a comeback with Yusuf Islam standing right beside him. The occasion is A&M;/Universal Music Enterprises’ newly remastered reissue of his original albums, marking the 30th anniversary of his debut. Stevens’ first three albums come out Tuesday, with three more to follow in July.

While it was the label’s initiative, Islam became involved in supervising the release, in part because it afforded an opportunity to draw some attention to his devotional records, including Islam’s American debut, the children’s religious guide “A Is for Allah.”

Islam, 52, sports traditional Muslim barbering: long beard and short hair. With a trace of the old media awareness, he worries that a wide-angle lens makes him look all whiskers. But he’s trim, sprightly, still smiles like Cat Stevens, and he wants to clarify a few things.

“I’ve ‘come out’ to explain myself,” he says. “I think one of my biggest mistakes during the Rushdie skirmish was allowing other people to explain my life for me; one of my favorite songs is Nina Simone’s ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.’ ”

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Having arranged to meet on the steps of the British Museum, he proceeds to conduct a guided tour--on foot and by car--of his roots in posh Bloomsbury and seedy Soho.

See. The fire escapes he shinnied up with his best friend Andy just to walk on the rooftops and overlook the city. The Shaftesbury Theatre where he stood outside the stage door for whole evenings listening to the latest musical.

And there’s the Roman Catholic school where, being Greek Orthodox, he was excluded from religious observances, but enjoyed the Irish jigs.

Look. The site of his father’s restaurant, Stavros’s--now a smart wine bar--where young Steven hummed his first “compositions” into life as he did the washing up. (He lived in the apartment above until he was 25, when tax exile took him to Brazil.)

The streets teemed with cosmopolitan cultures, while at home his father’s Mediterranean heat balanced his Swedish mother’s “cool, collected” ways--or not, since he and his older brother and sister spent a lot of their young emotional energies on ultimately fruitless efforts to hold their parents together. “I lived a lot in a few years,” he says.

Strong currents seem to have been his natural milieu. At 19, in 1967, he stepped out of the folk clubs and into the U.K. Top 10 with the neatly satirical “Matthew and Son.” But after a year of hits, he had his first brush with mortality. And failure. Improbably, he caught tuberculosis. In a hospital for three months, convalescing for almost a year, he was unable to promote his second album, and it bombed.

“A quick rise to fame and a sudden death,” he says. “I was out of the spotlight, no longer news. I could have really died too. There comes a point where you have to ask yourself where you’re going.”

He began to explore, though in a fairly random way. While his prolific output of ruminative rock in the early ‘70s brought stardom, he read high philosophy and practiced low superstition.

“I used to hedge my bets,” he says with a laugh. “I carried a cross and a rabbit’s foot. I wouldn’t travel on the 13th. I made sure my flat in Rio had a good view of the statue of Jesus on the mountain above the city. I was looking for a place of safety.”

Even after his personal miracle at Malibu, he remained confused: “I’d made this commitment to work for God, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I was embarrassed.”

Eventually, it was a book that did it for him. His brother David, just back from a visit to Jerusalem, though not a convert, gave him a copy of the Koran and Cat Stevens read himself into Yusuf Islam: “With no one drilling me, reading all by myself, I fathomed into the depths of it.”

He took the faith on Dec. 23, 1977. Two years later, he entered an arranged, still successful, marriage with Fouzia Ali--whom he fondly acknowledges as just the sort of hardheaded woman he sang about so wistfully on “Tea for the Tillerman” three decades ago. Soon the first of his five children was born.

As a family they immersed themselves in the devout procedures of Islam, their days built around the five pauses for prayer to Mecca, starting at dawn. Previously a generous donor to such causes as UNICEF, he gave half of his substantial royalty income to Islamic charities, especially the trust he set up to found Islamic schools in London (there are four now, one of them royally blessed by a recent visit from Prince Charles).

All of which business he conducted with diligent anonymity until “The Satanic Verses” hit the bookshops.

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Even today, he is terribly uncomfortable discussing the controversy, suggesting he was “painted into a hole” by crafty journalists who needed a sound bite from the only celebrity Muslim in the U.K. He reckons he said nothing at all about the fatwa itself, quoting only the “strict scriptural position” on Rushdie’s offense.

“It’s not fair to then brand me as somebody that I’m not, to make me out to be militant,” he says.

Yet he cannot say, and one cannot assume that he privately believes, the fatwa was definitely wrong. Such scriptural rules are an element of his religion as the Ten Commandments are to a Christian, he says.

However, wounded, he set about healing his own reputation and his faith’s. “The outcome was my realization that, unless you actively inform and communicate, people are going to invent. The picture of Islam coming across in the West was so bad that I had to do something.”

Yusuf Islam went public. He went international. With British Muslim colleagues, he launched a peace offensive. It took him to places of frustration and danger.

In Iraq, just before the Gulf War, he helped set up a “peace camp” between the hostile parties and negotiate the release of 100 hostages held by Saddam Hussein’s regime, although he could do nothing about the bigger picture. “I was trying to create some channels of understanding,” he says, ruefully.

Last year, as the NATO bombardment of Serbia raged, he, along with half a dozen others, tried to deliver $33,000 they had collected directly to Kosovo refugees. But they were stopped by border guards in Macedonia and all the money was “confiscated.”

Still, a charitable trust he heads called Small Kindness is now delivering funds to hundreds of Kosovo war orphans, a total of about $800,000 to date.

Compared to these ventures, then, it was a relatively mundane step to return to the recording studio in 1995 for the devotional narrative-with-music album “The Life of the Last Prophet,” which launched his own Mountain of Light label and sold 350,000 copies worldwide. A couple of years later in Sarajevo, he even played a concert for the first time in almost 20 years. Clearly, channels of understanding were opening up between Yusuf Islam and Cat Stevens.

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He concludes his tour of his childhood in Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley, center of the British pop music industry until the Beatles came and threw the hacks out of the temple.

“I recorded my first demo over there,” he says. “The old carpenter who fitted out my dad’s restaurant lived down that alley.”

He proposes driving up to Willesden, the slightly up-market northwestern suburb where he lives and runs his four Islamic schools. On the way, he drops by the Central Mosque to pose for pictures, peers at a gym in passing and murmurs “One day,” then pulls up at his boys’ school--where rather awkwardly he has to ask his female public relations agent to wait in the car.

Like every teenage lad in Britain, at break time the boys outside play soccer. Until they notice Islam. Then all eyes turn his way and, unprompted, they form a line to shake the hand of this evidently revered elder and benefactor. They all say, “Hello, sir.” He greets most of them by name and gives them the luminous smile.

Next stop, just up the road: coffee at the hotel one of his charitable trusts bought to help finance the schools. Muslim-friendly, but all welcome, he affirms.

Where the zealous convert had rejected everything about his glamorous past, the middle-aged diplomat has accepted that it was all one life, one identity, in different stages of development, and that many of the songs he wrote “still stand as something gentle and meaningful and significant.” He has even permitted himself to voice sadness at his sudden sundering of the glorious relationship between artist and audience. “It was a breaking of the connection between souls.”

But for all his unexpected smiles and current tendency to moist-eyed nostalgia, he remains fundamentally grave as he takes on responsibilities of a quite different order from those perceived of the average rock star.

“I’m a reference point for two different worlds,” he says. He knows only too well that he cannot afford to make mistakes. Which is why America will be seeing no live performances at his upcoming promotional appearances, only talk illustrated by taped music.

“There’s no Islamic law against concerts,” he says. “But the more strict theologians might not approve, and I don’t want to get on their wrong side.” Quite. *