My latest in PJ Media:
Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens is a darling of the Western media these days, because he converted to the elites’ favored religion. Critics generally treat Bob Dylan’s “Christian period” as an embarrassing anomaly in his otherwise stellar career, while Yusuf Islam gets a fawning feature in Yahoo Music Sunday to explain his thinking and justify his action.
Yahoo’s Erin Donnelly writes that “the singer who rose to fame as Cat Stevens, and is now known as Yusef/Cat Stevens, is getting candid about his conversion to Islam and the fallout that ensued.” Would Erin Donnelly ever take to Yahoo to publish a lavish puff piece about a singer, songwriter, artist, whatever, who had become an evangelical Christian? Would Yahoo explain with journalistic portent that this artist was finally “getting candid about his conversion,” or would it be much more likely to publish something about how the Christian convert was under fire, his friends were shaking their heads and doubting the soundness of his mind, etc.? You know the answer.
Donnelly then takes us through a brief recapitulation of a story that Yusuf Islam has actually been “candid” about many times before: that of “the 1976 near-death experience that resulted in him turning to the Muslim faith.” The former feline explains: “I was an Englishman. I didn’t know it wasn’t wise to go out at that time of day and take a swim, so I did. I decided to turn back and head for shore and, of course, at that point I realized, ‘I’m fighting the Pacific.’ There was no way I was going to win. There was only one thing to do and that was to pray to the almighty to save me. And I did. I called out to God and he saved me. A little wave came from behind. It wasn’t big. It was just simply pushing me forward. “The tide somehow had changed and I was able to get back to land. So I was saved. I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
What happened next was that Cat’s brother gave him a Qur’an, and as that other famous convert once said about a different book, every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coals. “I would never have picked up a Quran,” says Mr. Islam. “But it became the gateway. After a year I could not hold myself back. I had to bow down.”
However, that was when new troubles began for the poor dear. In Turkey, he says, he was “raised on this pedestal,” but it was a different story in the West, or as Yusuf Islam calls it, “the other side”: “But on the other side there were people who said, ‘He’s a bit of a traitor, isn’t he? He’s turned Turk.’”
Yusuf lamented: “That was very difficult because at one point I was an icon of the majority and now I am part of the minority who are looked down upon and certainly, to a large extent, misunderstood.”
There is much more. Read the rest here.