(Credits: Far Out / Video Still)
Tue 14 October 2025 0:00, UK
This story about Yusuf Islam, or Cat Stevens, being stopped in an airport is one of those tales that feels so painstakingly ignorant that it almost borders on irony. It makes you want to laugh, but then you remember that this is the world, these are real people, and this is the politics we’re still falling into more and more and more.
It’s ignorant because there could really be no strong spokesperson in music for peace than him. He’s won awards for his work, including the Man of Peace Award of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, quite literally for his “dedication to promote peace, the reconciliation of people, and to condemn terrorism”. He’s won the World Award for “humanitarian relief work helping children and victims of war”. He’s been granted two honorary doctorates for his humanitarian work, and that’s only brushing the surface.
Islam has spent his entire career promoting peace after falling incredibly ill with tuberculosis. Things like that put the world into perspective, and after a near-death experience and so long spent isolated in a hospital, the artist recovered and set about writing song after song after song about peace, and when they made his name, he used his platform to speak on it too.
In the late 1977s, though, his life gained a new focus as he converted to Islam and changed his name from Cat Stevens to Yusuf Islam as a sign of devotion. That same year, he headlined a huge charity concert for UNICEF, so don’t be mistaken in thinking his work took any degree of backseat. It was merely that the artist found religion. Even when he quit music for an extended period, he still used his money earned for those same causes.
Yusuf/Cat Stevens playing in Hyde Park in 2025. (Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
That’s why the scene is ridiculous. In 2004, Yusuf Islam, the famed musician and pacifist, was travelling from London back to America when the authorities in Bangor, Maine, pulled him into a back room, separated him from his family, questioned him and then, the following day, sent him back to the UK, denying him entry.
They were claiming that Islam-funded terrorist groups had been flagged on a watch list. Three years on from 9/11, America remained in high alert, but mostly, there was an undeniably boom in islamophobia following the event. So for someone like Islam, with that name and his vocal love for his religion, the result was felt clearly in this obvious act of ignorance.
The irony is that Islam, once again a famed pacifist, had condemned the attack, as he would condemn any act of violence. “I wish to express my heartfelt horror at the indiscriminate terrorist attacks committed against innocent people of the United States yesterday,” he said in a statement, and later performed ‘Peace Train’ at a memorial concert for the victims. This is a man who obviously stands directly against terrorism, yet the authorities wouldn’t see that.
“Is this the same planet I’d taken off from? I was devastated,” Islam wrote a week after the incident in the Los Angeles Times. “The unbelievable thing is that only two months earlier, I had been having meetings in Washington with top officials from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to talk about my charity work. Even further back, one month after the attack on the World Trade Centre, I was in New York meeting Peter Gabriel and Hillary Rodham Clinton at the World Economic Forum!”
“Had I changed that much? No,” he continued, calling it out for exactly what it was – “Actually, it’s the indiscriminate procedure of profiling that’s changed. I am a victim of an unjust and arbitrary system, hastily imposed, that serves only to belittle America’s image as a defender of the civil liberties that so many dearly struggled and died for over the centuries.”
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