page_title: Cat Stevens
section_title: Muslim faith and musical career
hierarchical_section_title: Cat Stevens / Biography and career / Life as Yusuf Islam (1978–present) / Muslim faith and musical career
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped version of Image:Islam Expo 2008 (meeting) Artist Yusuf Islam.jpg
context_page_description: Yusuf Islam, commonly known by his stage name Cat Stevens, and later Yusuf and eventually Yusuf/Cat Stevens, is a British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His musical style consists of folk, pop, rock, and, in his later career, Islamic music. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.
  His 1967 debut album and its title song "Matthew and Son" both reached top ten in the UK charts. Stevens' albums Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat were certified triple platinum in the US. His 1972 album Catch Bull at Four spent weeks at the top of several major charts. He earned ASCAP songwriting awards in 2005 and 2006 for "The First Cut Is the Deepest", and the song has been a hit for four artists. His other hit songs include "Father and Son", "Wild World", "Moonshadow", "Peace Train", and "Morning Has Broken".
  In December 1977, Stevens converted to Islam and adopted the name Yusuf Islam the following year. In 1979, he auctioned all of his guitars for charity.
context_section_description: Following his conversion, Islam abandoned his musical career for nearly two decades. In 2007, he said that when he became a Muslim in 1977, the Imam at his mosque told him that it was fine to continue as a musician, as long as the songs were morally acceptable, but others were saying that "it was all prohibited", and he decided to avoid the question by ceasing to perform. He has said that there was "a combination of reasons, really", and that the continuing demands of the music business had been "becoming a chore, and not an inspiration anymore". In a 2004 interview on Larry King Live, he said "A lot of people would have loved me to keep singing. You come to a point where you have sung, more or less ... your whole repertoire and you want to get down to the job of living. You know, up until that point, I hadn't had a life. I'd been searching, been on the road."
  Estimating in January 2007 that he was continuing to earn approximately US$1.5 million a year from his Cat Stevens music, he said he would use his accumulated wealth and ongoing earnings from his music career for philanthropic and educational causes in the Muslim community of London and elsewhere. In 1983, he founded the Islamia Primary School in Brondesbury Park, later moved to Salusbury Road, in the north London area of Queen's Park and, soon after, founded several Muslim secondary schools; in 1992, he set up The Association of Muslim Schools (AMS-UK), a charity that brought together all the Muslim schools in the UK. He is also the founder and chairman of the Small Kindness charity, which initially assisted famine victims in Africa and now supports thousands of orphans and families in the Balkans, Indonesia, and Iraq. He served as chairman of the charity Muslim Aid from 1985 to 1993.
caption: Islam appearing at the Islam Expo in London (2008)
exif: {}