Cat Stevens converts to Islam at Malibu

A vow made in deep water has a different weight from a vow made on land. The drowning man bargains because he has nothing left to offer but the life he is about to lose, and because the bargain costs him nothing if the sea wins. What troubles the rest of his years is the smaller, harder question: whether, having been returned to the beach, he meant it.

THE SINGER AT TWENTY-EIGHT

He is Steven Demetre Georgiou, born above the family café on New Oxford Street, son of a Greek Cypriot restaurateur and a Swedish Baptist mother, schooled in Soho between the smell of fried onions and the bells of the Greek Orthodox cathedral on Moscow Road. He has been three people already. He was the art-school boy at Hammersmith in 1965, sketching faces in a sketchbook. He was the teenage pop singer of I Love My Dog in 1966, dressed in stage suits cut too tight, riding the Decca promotion machine. He was the tubercular convalescent of 1969, twelve months in the King Edward VII Hospital at Midhurst coughing into a kidney dish and writing songs in a small black notebook. Out of that ward came Mona Bone Jakon, then Tea for the Tillerman, then Teaser and the Firecat, then Catch Bull at Four, then Foreigner, then Buddha and the Chocolate Box, then Numbers. Six years of platinum. He is twenty-eight, and the records have stopped feeling like answers.

THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY

The house above Carbon Beach is rented, white-walled, all glass on the seaward side. The Pacific Coast Highway runs behind it; the traffic is a low constant. Inside, the kitchen is full of fruit and the brown paper bags of the health-food shop further up the coast. He has been reading, in the months before, books picked up between cities: Zen, Subud, the I Ching, numerology, Gurdjieff, The Secret Path. None of them sit. The fame has the texture of dry paper. He walks down to the sand in the afternoon, the haze low and gold over the water, the gulls hanging in the on-shore wind. The autumn ocean off Malibu is colder than people expect. He goes in alone.

THE CURRENT

He is a competent swimmer, an Australian crawl learned in English baths and rehearsed in this same water through the residency. He goes out further than he means to. When he turns, the line of houses along the highway has slid northward, and he understands that he has not been moving on the surface but underneath it. The rip is pulling him obliquely up the coast, towards the mouth of the lagoon. He tries the crawl against it and the crawl does nothing. He tries to angle across it and the angle does not hold. The shore is there, distinct, the small figures on it going about their afternoons, and he cannot reach the shore. The water is suddenly the only fact. His arms are heavy. The salt is in his throat. He understands, with the practical clarity of a man who has been ill before and knows the body's small announcements, that he may be about to drown off a beach in California in the autumn of 1976, and that no-one on the sand will see it happen.

THE BARGAIN

What goes through him is not eloquent. It is the sentence a man uses when there is nothing else left in the sentence-making part of him. By his own account in the 1981 memoir, the words form themselves: Oh God, if you save me I will work for you. He does not specify which God. He has been raised between an Orthodox font and a Baptist Sunday school and has spent the last decade reading around the edges of every mystic tradition the King's Road bookshops will sell him; the word God in his mouth at that moment is unattached to any of them. It is simply the older word, the one underneath the others. He says it, or thinks it, and waits for the sea to answer. The sea answers. A swell turns under him, the rip slackens, a southward push he has not earned carries him in towards the sand. He swims when swimming begins to be possible again. He comes ashore at Carbon Beach further down than where he started, on his hands and knees in the shallows, coughing, and walks up the beach past people who have noticed nothing.

THE HOUSE THAT EVENING

He dries off in the white-tiled bathroom. He sits at the kitchen table with a glass of water and writes, in the small notebook he keeps for lyrics, the fact of the afternoon. He does not yet know what he has promised. The promise is in the room with him like a piece of furniture he has not chosen. He goes back to London for Christmas. His elder brother David, who has been to Jerusalem and to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and has come home unsettled by what he heard there, hands him a wrapped parcel. Inside is an English translation of the Qur'an, the Yusuf Ali edition, dark green. He reads it slowly across eighteen months, in hotel rooms and on aeroplanes, on the tour for Izitso and on into the writing of Back to Earth. The book does what no other book has done. It is not asking him to feel; it is asking him to obey. The bargain in the water begins to acquire a shape.

REGENT'S PARK, 23 DECEMBER 1977

The Islamic Cultural Centre on the edge of Regent's Park is new, the gold dome only barely weathered. He arrives on a Friday afternoon. He takes off his shoes. He says, after the imam, the two sentences that make a Muslim a Muslim: Ash-hadu an la ilaha illa Allah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasul Allah. I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God. The English singer Cat Stevens does not leave the building. The man who leaves the building is Yusuf Islam. He is twenty-nine years old. He has been famous for eleven years and is about to stop.

THE AUCTION

On 28 November 1979 the guitars go. Sotheby's of New Bond Street holds the sale; the lots include the instruments on which Wild World and Father and Son and Peace Train and Moonshadow were written and recorded, the stage clothes, the gold discs in their frames. The hammer falls and falls. The proceeds, near twenty thousand pounds, are routed to Islamic charities. He does not attend. He has by then bought a house in Brent and is reading the proposals for a primary school he means to open there. The instruments leave the building in the hands of strangers. The career, which had run unbroken from Mona Bone Jakon in 1970 through Back to Earth in 1978, ten albums in nine years, closes that afternoon as cleanly as a door.

THE LONG SILENCE

For twenty-eight years he does not record a popular album. He founds Islamia Primary School in Brent in 1983, the first Muslim state-funded school in Britain. He raises money for famine in Bosnia and orphans in Iraq. He sings nasheeds, voice only, no instruments, on cassettes sold from the back of mosques. He is in the news for the wrong reasons in 1989 and again in 2004 and learns the cost of being a public Muslim man in English; he gives interviews carefully after that, and less often. In 2006 he releases An Other Cup, picks the guitar up again, finds it where he left it. In 2014 he plays Glastonbury on a summer evening and a hundred thousand people sing Father and Son back at him across the field, both parts, his own old voice in their throats.

THE RETURN

The decisive hour at Carbon Beach took perhaps four minutes. It produced a vow whose interest he was still paying half a century later, in a school in Brent, in a mosque in Regent's Park, in the silence between his ninth and his tenth album. The English popular song of the 1970s lost one of its best writers to it; Islam in Britain gained an institution and a voice. He keeps, by his own account, the green Yusuf Ali Qur'an his brother gave him in the Christmas of 1976, the cover worn pale along the spine from the eighteen months in which he made up his mind.