Cat Stevens is known for several things, among them anthems such as \u201cWild World,\u201d \u201cMorning Has Broken,\u201d and \u201cPeace Train.\u201d Those songs, he writes, came to him after a shattered first career as a pop singer, which left him \u201call burned out at the age of nineteen, after only sixteen months: show business had done its worst and had made me well and truly sick to death.\u201d Ill with tuberculosis, he read up on Asian religions, following in the path of George Harrison, a strong early influence, then retreated to his parents\u2019 home and began to pour out the songs that would make him internationally famous. As Stevens recounts, that fame never quite sat well with him, and his spiritual wanderings brought him to Islam in the late 1970s, when he changed his name to Yusuf Islam and took a long hiatus away from music, including selling all his instruments in the belief that music was \u201cun-Islamic and downright sinful.\u201d It was in this third phase that Stevens became known for something else: his apparent support for the clerical fatwa that condemned Salman Rushdie to death for his book The Satanic Verses. Stevens protests that he was misunderstood: \u201cEven if the generally accepted view of capital punishment for the crime of insulting the Prophet was absolutely valid, vigilantism was inimical and outlawed by the teachings of Islam.\u201d The \u201cabsolutely valid\u201d bit is a little troubling, but suffice it to say that the singer eventually decided that music wasn\u2019t so evil after all, now in the belief that \u201cone main aim of music, as I see it, is to make the world a happier, more harmonious place for us to live in together.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cat Stevens is known for several things, among them anthems such as \u201cWild World,\u201d \u201cMorning Has Broken,\u201d and \u201cPeace Train.\u201d Those songs, he writes, came to him after a shattered first career as a pop singer, which left him \u201call burned out at the age of nineteen, after only sixteen months: show business had done […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4345"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}