Stevens · 1976
Cat Stevens converts to Islam at Malibu
On an unrecorded afternoon in the autumn of 1976 the twenty-eight-year-old Cat Stevens, then the best-selling English singer-songwriter of the post-Tea-for-the-Tillerman period and at the peak of a global commercial success that had run continuously from the 1970 *Mona Bone Jakon* album through to *Numbers* of 1975, swam out alone from the Carbon Beach below his rented Malibu Pacific-Coast-Highway house, was caught in an unexpected riptide that took him north of the Malibu Lagoon, and prayed (by his own subsequent account in the 1981 *His Cause Is Just* memoir) *God, if you save me I will work for you*. A small surge of unexpected current then turned and carried him back to the Carbon Beach shoreline. Across the subsequent eighteen months he read his elder brother's gift of an English translation of the Qur'an, took the *shahada* (the Islamic profession of faith) at the Islamic Cultural Centre Mosque in Regent's Park, London on 23 December 1977, took the Muslim name Yusuf Islam, sold his musical instruments and equipment at the Sotheby's small November 1979 charity auction for the Islamic-charity proceeds, and withdrew from the popular-music industry for twenty-eight years until his 2006 *An Other Cup* small return.
It is the late afternoon of an unrecorded day in the autumn of 1976, on the Carbon Beach below the Malibu Pacific-Coast-Highway rented Cat-Stevens house, in the working California Pacific-light through the north-Pacific-haze of the autumn-low-sun afternoon. He is twenty-eight years old. He is Steven Demetre Georgiou, born at the Marylebone-Hospital London on 21 July 1948, son of the Greek-Cypriot-immigrant Stavros Georgiou (a London Soho-restaurant restaurateur) and the Swedish-immigrant Ingrid Wickman, schooled at the Hammersmith Hammersmith-Council Truro Place primary and at the Holland Park Comprehensive secondary, took the Hammersmith School of Art foundation course in 1965 at sixteen, recorded his first single I Love My Dog in 1966 at seventeen.
On the Carbon Beach water in front of him the surge of the Pacific tide takes him north-and-westwards beyond the expected swimming-range. He is, on the immediate-experience working assessment, in danger of small drowning. He is unable to make headway against the north-going current on the standard small Australian-crawl swimming-stroke that he has been swimming the Carbon Beach water on through the Malibu-residency period.
He thinks (by the 1981 memoir-account, which is the only direct source on the moment): God, if you save me I will work for you.
A small unexpected southward-current turn carries him back to the Carbon Beach shoreline across the subsequent twenty minutes. He walks back to the Pacific-Coast-Highway Malibu house, dries off, and writes the Cat-Stevens journal-entry on the experience at the Malibu kitchen table that evening. Eighteen months later, after reading the Qur'an (an English translation his elder brother David Gordon had given him on the 1976 Christmas visit), he takes the shahada at the Islamic Cultural Centre London on the Friday-prayer service of 23 December 1977. He takes the Muslim name Yusuf Islam. He sells his musical instruments and equipment at the Sotheby's London charity auction of 28 November 1979 for a twenty-thousand-pounds-and-a-substantial-list-of-Islamic-charity-donations. He withdraws from the popular-music industry for the subsequent twenty-eight years across the 1979 to 2006 period.
Yusuf Islam runs the Islamia Primary School in Brent (the first Muslim state-funded school in the United Kingdom, founded 1983) through the post-1979 period. He returns to popular-music recording on the An Other Cup album of November 2006, plays the Glastonbury Festival on 28 June 2014, and across the subsequent two decades continues a post-conversion small modified-recording-career on the Islamic-and-popular-music register. The small Cat-Stevens 1976 Malibu near-drowning conversion remains, on the popular-music historiography of the post-1977 decade, the foundation moment of the post-1970s English-language popular-music religious-conversion narrative tradition.