Yusuf Islam, not Cat Stevens, defined a generation
Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, plans to perform concerts around Australia in June. I have liked his music, but I won't attend.
I cannot forget watching an artist saying another deserved to die because of his art.
Peter Kavanagh, a Victorian state MP goes further and suggests we deny him a visa unless he publicly recants from that view. Whatever the Immigration authorities decide, it's worth being clear on what he stood for.
The publicity for his Australian tour trumpets: "As Cat Stevens he defined a generation". It's a big claim, even as marketing puff. Yusuf may indeed have done so, but not the way his promotion suggests. If one moment defines the cultural history of Yusuf's generation, it's Valentine's Day 1989. In Christopher Hitchens words: 'this was not just a warning of what was to come. It was the warning…For our time and generation, the great conflict between the ironic mind and the literal mind, the experimental and the dogmatic, the tolerant and the fanatical, is the argument that was kindled by The Satanic Verses.' Every time I hear a Cat Stevens song, or see a mention of Yusuf, my first thought is to remember his part in that argument.
He was famous. As Cat Stevens he'd been a very popular singer songwriter. He wrote and sang lyrical songs full of concern for personal freedom and kindness and peace. By 1989, after a decade as Yusuf Islam, he'd been described as Britain's most famous Muslim convert.
It was natural that he would be asked his opinion about Ayatollah Khomeini's call and promise of reward for Salman Rushdie's death. Yusuf agreed to join the panel of Geoffrey Robertson's Hypothetical to discuss the issues on television.
I watched the program when it was shown in Australia in October that year. I'm still dismayed by the memory:
More on this story at Winds of Jihad
Geoffrey Robertson: You don't think that this man deserves to die? Yusuf Islam: Who? Salman Rushdie? Geoffrey Robertson: Yes. Yusuf Islam: Yes, yes.
Yusuf's website includes a variety of clarifications and justifications for his comments about Mr Rushdie on that program and elsewhere:
- he never called for Rushdie's death or supported the fatwa;
- his remarks in the Hypothetical were an attempt to lighten the moment and raise a smile, British dry humour; and
- he's been tricked, misquoted and misinterpreted by the media.
He uses a Nina Simone song he covered as a headline, '…please don't let me be misunderstood", and complains that no matter how many times he tries to explain, journalists bring it up 'as if it was the only memorable thing I was reported to have done in my almost sixty years living on this planet (yawn).' Recent articles say he now refuses to talk about the issue. Some postings of Hypothetical on YouTube say 'This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Yusuf Islam.'
You may for the moment be able to judge for yourself here whether his comments were dead pan or in deadly earnest.
Those who heard him at the time were in no doubt. Writer Fay Weldon, not unfamiliar with British dry humor, took him so seriously she wished the police superintendent on the panel would "come over and arrest this man here for inciting on television, people to violence implicitly and otherwise".
Mr Rushdie certainly didn't get the joke. He later wrote to the Sunday Telegraph saying that however much Yusuf may wish to rewrite his past, he was neither misunderstood nor misquoted and recalled that asked what he'd do if Mr Rushdie turned up at his doorstep looking for help, he'd said 'I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is'.
Yusuf was quizzed repeatedly about his views, and he issued a statement on 2 March 1989 to clarify. [The statement is quoted in full as a footnote here.]
He says that when asked questions he couldn't tell a lie and was just trying to describe Islamic law, and points out that there are 'similar harsh laws' in the Bible, and that 'Muslims are bound to keep within the limits of the law of the country in which they live'. This is disingenuous.
Whether ancient legal codes prescribe violent physical punishment was never at issue. The question repeatedly asked of him was what place he thought such laws should have in a contemporary heterogenous world. It's clear he thinks English law deficient, and regretted that there was little chance of Islamic Law being applied in Britain in the near future.
When he gave an extended interview to the US cable TV news program World Monitor, he reaffirmed his support for Mr Rushdie's death. His statements leave no doubt. He supported capital punishment for blasphemy and the killing of Salman Rushdie.
We all make mistakes. There are constant reminders of the problems a few ill-chosen words in public can cause, including recent examples from Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister of the UK, to Nick Sowden, now expelled from the Queensland Liberal National Party.
It's possible to interpret Yusuf's comments simply in terms of his own life, even to make light of them or to feel sorry for him, like his former fiancee Lucy Johnson, a stripper known as Princess Cheyenne, who was reported in the Boston Globe as saying at the time: "He's really a sweetheart; he just lost it. Obviously, he's gone through a lot of changes. He used to be an extremely fragile person. When he embraced Islam, it was like do or die. It was an all-encompassing thing for him. He goes by the protocol. If it's protocol, he's all for it. He's a very serious man. You've got to feel sorry for someone like that. Of all people to be for censorship, a writer. He wrote 'Peace Train' about an orgasm."
Ultimately, however, it's not something to be made light of. It's not a yawn. It mattered then and it matters now. Yusuf supported killing a man because someone took offence at what he had written.
Beyond the deaths and threats of violence that still continue, a generation whose legacy of cultural freedom allowed the young Cat Stevens to pursue his spiritual journey and to choose for himself was infected by self censorship and hate. Opportunities for mutual tolerance and accommodation have been diminished in favour of a readiness to take offence and contagious gangland demands for respect.
The marketing puff for Yusuf's tour says when he was last here he was given books on Rumi and numerology - all part of his "Road to Findout" and promises he will his return will deliver "the result of an extraordinary spiritual journey." In his own life he has changed his name and changed his mind, and he makes much of his quest. Last year he unveiled a musical that he describes as 'a metaphorical mirror of my own journey.'
One might hope that a man with such a life might be tolerant of the quests and questioning of others, however confident he was with his present position. But Yusuf had no sympathy for Mr Rushdie's artistic quest. He would look for juridical uncertainty when his son brought home a guitar, but not for Mr Rushdie's questioning.
You don't think this man deserves to die? Yes, yes.
In many cases, as then Prime Minister Brown desperately hoped, a ready apology and an acknowledgement of harm can lessen a mistake. But 20 years on Yusuf seems to think all the wrongs were done by others. Journalists asked him loaded questions. His replies were misinterpreted. It was the book, not the call for violence that "destroyed the harmony between peoples and created an unnecessary international crisis". At worst, his remarks were silly but they were dry English humour.
He defined a generation but not as the young Cat Stevens enjoying and celebrating the fruits of freedom and searching for answers. He did it in a few words on television as a rigid man convinced he now had the answers, denying that freedom to others.
He will probably sing Peace Train at his concerts:
Now I've been crying lately,
thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating,
why can't we live in bliss?
It's time he stopped singing the question and answered it. He had an opportunity to stand for peace and tolerance when the need for such a voice was critical. Instead, when Geoffrey Robertson asked the question, he found no room for tolerance or doubt, but with dogmatic certainty took the side of violence and tyranny.
For me, it remains the most important thing he ever did. Unless he revisits the issue and finds room for difference, in my mind he's forever defined by the choice he made in those weeks in 1989. The only message I hear from him is the echo of Khomeini's threat not just to Salman Rushdie but to every free thinker in the world: If you speak your mind we may kill you.
Michael Gordon-Smith is a Sydney-based management consultant. He used to be a public servant.
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