Cat Stevens Casts Moonshadow Over Nashville

Yusuf Islam — better known as legendary singer-songwriter Cat Stevens — tweeted a photograph of himself in the stands on Sunday at the 49ers-Cowboys game in Santa Clara, California.

It was a quintessentially American scene, except for the text the London-born Yusuf, 68, tagged to the photo: “American football? I still don’t really understand it …”

Nashville has been a magnet for Muslim immigration in recent years.

By the same token, many people these days don’t really understand what to make of the man alternatively known as Yusuf or Cat Stevens.

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On the one hand, he wrote many beloved songs still covered by artists worldwide today. On the other, his late-’70s conversion to Islam prompted him to suspend his music career and later put him at the center of controversial issues related to the religion and how it’s perceived around the world.

Yusuf was in the Bay Area as part of a 12-city tour, visiting some cities he hasn’t played in four decades.

Last week, he performed in Nashville for the first time since 1976, which also reunited him with an Islamic mosque he helped make a reality in the late 1970s. The home of the Country Music Hall of Fame is now also the home of the Islamic Center of Nashville, which got a huge boost in its founding years, thanks to a check of almost $2,000 from Yusuf.

Last week, as Yusuf dropped by the mosque he helped establish, telling The Tennessean newspaper that he “found a great openness to share [a] message of unity, love and peace which I had discovered. … I am proud that the Center in Nashville has become a beacon for understanding and sharing spiritual values. It was obviously money well spent!”

Dr. AKM Fakhruddin, a founding member of the mosque, told the newspaper that shortly after receiving Yusuf’s donation in the late ’70s, the iconic singer-songwriter visited and began helping to scout locations for the religious and cultural center.

Related: The Democrats’ Islam Problem

Nashville has been a magnet for Muslim immigration in recent years, boasting the largest Kurdish population in the United States, according to a BuzzFeed article from April. It all stems from the 1990s, when thousands of Iraqi Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime were admitted into America and resettled in Nashville.

In 2012, Nashville had the fastest-growing immigrant population of any American city. A September 2015 PBS report noted that 12 percent of Nashville residents at that time were foreign-born, as opposed to just 2 percent in 2000.

Both the BuzzFeed and PBS stories note that Nashville leaders have prioritized strong interfaith relationships in the city, but both also noted a recent rise in anti-Muslim sentiment due to worldwide incidents of violent Islamic terrorism.

As for Yusuf, he didn’t make a big deal of last week’s mosque visit, which is indicative of the fine line the singer-activist has walked in recent years.

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Being outspoken about such issues has put him under intense scrutiny before. And given today’s political climate — particularly as it relates to Islamophobia, Syrian immigration, and violent jihadist groups such as ISIS — keeping a low profile might not be a bad idea.

Anyone born after 1980 never lived in a time before Yusuf Islam, a time when the artist was just Cat Stevens.

In the late ’60s and early to mid-’70s, he penned such classic songs as “Peace Train,” “Wild World,” “Father and Son,” “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” “Moon Shadow,” and “Here Comes My Baby.” He was one of the best-known and most influential folk-rock singers in the world. But after converting to Islam, he changed his name and gave it all up.

It wasn’t his first name change. He was born Steven Demetre Georgiou to parents of Greek and Cypriot heritage.

These days, he’s often billed as both Yusuf Islam and Cat Stevens, covering all the bases. His Twitter handle is @YusufCatStevens. But Stevens is the name under which Yusuf joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. His induction and live performance at the ceremony was one of the most visible steps of returning to the public eye over the last decade.

Yusuf told Rolling Stone in January 2015 that part of his decision to play music again was that after 9/11, the world needed to see “at least one non-violent Muslim on TV.”

Regardless of the sentiment, not everyone believes Yusuf is necessarily the best spokesman for Islam. The vast majority of that concern dates back to 1998, when the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (a legal decision in the Islamic faith) that called for the assassination of India-born British author Salman Rushdie. Khomeini said he had determined that Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses” had blasphemed against Islam.

Two months later, Yusuf weighed in on Khomeini’s decree while appearing on British television. He replied affirmatively when asked whether Rushdie “deserves to die.” The New York Times reported that Yusuf also said: “I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is.”

He later tried to walk back the comments, which he attributed to “stupid and offensive jokes … made in bad taste,” although news reports indicate they were made sincerely at the time. He now says he never backed the fatwa against Rushdie, who in response has called such claims “rubbish.”

For a time in the mid-2000s, Yusuf was placed on a terrorist watch list and denied entry into the United States.

Regardless of Yusuf’s later attempts to disavow his statements on Rushdie, the comments took a toll on public appreciation for the performer, and the backlash likely will dog him for the rest of his life.