Ride on the Jihad Train

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The music of Stephen Georgiou Cat Stevens Yusuf Islam has been approved by the Ayatollahs of Iran for sale to the masses. Michael Jackson, despite his very public association with the Nation of Islam, is shunned: Iran decides Cat Stevens good, Michael Jackson bad.

TEHRAN: Iran’s Islamic Propagation Organization has decided the music of Cat Stevens, the British singer who converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam, has been given regime approval and will soon go on sale in the Islamic Republic.

“We have chosen to put on the market a selection of songs from Cat Stevens, to show to the Iranian youth that not everything in the West is bad,” the organization’s music director Reza Mahdavi told AFP.

He said Stevens, a folk icon of the late sixties and early seventies, contrasted with the likes of Michael Jackson - the “King of Pop” currently facing trial in the US for alleged child abuse.

“There may be Michael Jackson, but there is also Cat Stevens - who converted to Islam while in the heart of the same Western world,” Mahdavi enthused.

“We chose Yusef Islam because he is a Muslim artist,” he said, adding cassettes and CDs containing 75 of his songs - recorded before and after his 1977 conversion to Islam - would go on sale here on Sept. 20.

The music will be accompanied by a book featuring lyrics and their Persian translations, statements by the artist and a biography of Britain’s most famous Muslim convert - best remembered for hits such as “Wild World,” “Peace Train,” “Moon Shadow,” and “Morning Has Broken.”

The singer hit controversy in 1989 when he was quoted as supporting the death sentence against British author Salman Rushdie ordered by Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The musician has denied ever supporting the fatwa. [But he did, and he was also expelled from Israel for donating tens of thousands of dollars to Hamas. —ed.]

“We will also publish the comments of Yusef Islam after Sept. 11, in which he denounces the allegations made against Muslims,” the official said, before going on to say the singer should visit the Islamic Republic.

On the official Cat Stevens World Wide Web Site, we find this, from May 2000:

He embraced his new religion with a zeal common in converts, and signed on to many of its political trappings. In the 1980s, he supported the death sentence issued against author Salman Rushdie; during the Persian Gulf war he spoke sympathetically of his “Muslim brother,” Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Most recently, he joined a campaign in Britain to maintain a ban on homosexuality in schools. (It’s unclear whether he still supports these stands, because the topics were put strictly off limits, at his request, by a Universal publicist, who tightly monitored an interview on Saturday.)

And on another page at the official Cat Stevens World Wide Web Site, after 9/11, we find Cat’s semi-denial:

Still a relatively new Muslim, but being a well-known personality, I was invited to join a letter campaign requesting the publishers of the controversial novel to think again. I did, but they ignored the plea.

Suddenly the media tried linking me to supporting the Iran’s Fatwa on Salman Rushdie. The fact is that I never did support the Fatwa. Such is the irony. You wouldn’t ask a Christian to deny one of the Ten Commandments; equally, as a new Muslim, I couldn’t deny that the Quran, just like Leviticus in the Bible, forbade blasphemy and if there is no repentance, made it a capital offence.

UPDATE at 9/3/04 6:58:55 pm:

The page at rollingstone.com that we linked to (and quoted) in this entry from March 2003, about Yusuf Islam’s deportation from Israel for donating to Hamas, has been disappeared.

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Last updated: 2023-04-04 11:11 am PDT
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