Fear of the Cat

Cat Stevens was one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the 1970s, before he quit the music business and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. He talks to Jonathan Wingate

I t is difficult to imagine the mild-mannered man sitting in front of me being hauled off a flight from Heathrow to Washington DC by the FBI, on suspicion of being a threat to national security, but that is exactly what happened to Yusuf Islam in September of last year. He was on his way to Nashville, where he was due to start working on his first new secular music in over a quarter of a century.

The plane was diverted 600 miles to Bangor airport, Maine, where Yusuf Islam and his 21-year-old daughter were escorted off the aircraft, questioned for an hour and put straight back on a flight home to London. Since then, he has been wrongly accused of supporting terrorist groups by The Sun and The Sunday Times, who were recently forced to pay damages. There has been no such contrition or any sort of explanation from the US government.

“I thought the plane was being diverted for refuelling,” Islam remembers, sitting in the deserted café of a Waterloo rehearsal studio, where he has been working on a semi-autobiographical musical called Moonshadow. “Finally, these FBI agents asked me whether I minded coming with them to answer some questions, and then the whole thing unfolded. It really was like a film, but I was frightened, and I never knew how the …

by Jonathan Wingate
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