Talk:Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie

message: The sentence "Stevens himself said he was delighted by all the destruction, declaring his old music un-Islamic" is hyperbolic and not at all supported by the referenced article. The article contains the following statement "I am amazed that there are apparently plans to ban my music from the airwaves in America and maybe stop releasing my records[...] Only a few weeks ago, I wrote to the record companies asking that they do precisely that, but they refused because it would not be commercially viable for THEM! God works in mysterious ways." There is no mention of being "delighted at all the destruction" and absolutely no reference to "declaring his old music un-Islamic." Article is here:Stevenson, Richard W., "Books, Then Records, Flames Climb Higher," A18, New York Times, March 8, 1989
RumiNationZ (talk) 14:34, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed NPOV Sentence from "Criticism"

message: None of the sources cited in the section about Cat Stevens appearing in the 'The Satanic Verses' are reliable or verifiable.  They are purely speculative.  Therefore, I have removed that section from the article and also removed the NPOV tag. --BadMojoDE 22:04, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You aren't looking at the breadth of Cat Stevens' work if you only classify him as a folk singer. His own website shows his first two albums as being, in his words, "Pop Music". When he was hospitalized for TB, he began to change directions. Similarly, he did the same after Catch Bull at Four, with the addition of synthesizers, polymoog, and the like. See the Majicat fan site-- http://www.majicat.com -- with all the notable articles in it.  
Foreigner was his attempt at following the soul trends of Stevie Wonder, as you can check in interviews from Rolling Stone Magazine. Last, after giving up Western music and that scene, he became Yusuf Islam and fell into the category of Islamic Nasheeds and finally, Spoken Word (as in his In Praise of the Last Prophet), and transformed songs in Arabic as well. Finally, in 2006 he began playing his former sounding "Folk Rock", (the sound he had in 1970-74) with the advent of An Other Cup. True, he's best known for soft rock and folk music, but he's got 40+ years of influences by those he listened to and played with over the years, but if I had to pick one genre, he'd follow under "Folk Rock".  Listen to his version of The First Cut is the Deepest-- it's on You Tube, and tell me that's "FOLK MUSIC".  --leahtwosaints (talk) 10:46, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: This is quite easy to resolve

message: WP:RS cited are Juan Cole, History News Network, The Sydney Morning Herald, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Rolling Stone magazine, Granada Television and  BBC. --tickle me 05:39, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: notability tag

message: Although I still have some reservations about the neutrality of this article, namely in the weight given to the denials vs the accusations,  I think it has been improved by Booga's recent edits and I've removed the NPOV tag. I made some additional changes to the article as outlined in my last edit summary over there, not necessarily in any order:
# corrected typos and grammatical errors
# moved some references around and started to convert refs to the "cite news" standard - note that I added a  to one of the references that has just a newspaper name and date - we need more than that, even if a url is not available - article title, author name, etc. More work is needed on the reference style - I'll try to get to that
#added a relevant detail regarding Bilal X, that he is a Black Muslim - that is not a minor difference between the character and the real person. I would still like to see something from Salman Rushdie confirming that he based Bilal X on Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, but I can find nothing saying that.  So the references in this section are still speculation:  one person who wrote a study guide and a commentator, Pipes, who sees it as a possible reason - but it's all speculation.  I left the section in because the word "theorized" and other such words in the paragraph at least suggest that this is not a confirmed "fact", but am saying here that it would go a long way to neutrality if there were comments by Rushdie on this.
# removed a non RS source from intro - it was basically drawing its information from Wikipedia, so can't be used to confirm wikipedia, and doesn't add anything anyway
#removed the phrase "weasel words", leaving "what Coles believed were contradictory statements" - as explained above, those two words ("weasel words") are not necessary, as there is a whole paragraph explaining Coles' opinion, and those two words can be misunderstood, given that they have different meaning on Wikipedia - they don't add anything necessary to the section.  (Note, BoogaLouie, that I didn't say above that we should "eliminate a short summary of the case against Stevens by an Islamic scholar from an already short article" - or that Coles' entire statement was "not necessary".  I was talking about those two words. I think it is speculative and just his interpretation, but I didn't say we should remove it. Would hope we might find some statements on the other side of the issue for balance, though.)
#removed the word "later" from the intro when talking about Yusuf's denial that he was supporting the fatwa, as it was the next day - yes, technically it was "later", but it suggests that it was a long time later and since it was not, there's no reason to add that word
I think that is all of my changes - if there were any others, I'm not leaving them out of this list intentionally and will be glad to explain them if anyone finds any.   
My final comment (I hope) is: the fatwa of course was the  incendiary and vile act here, as I said in my last post above.  But the entire topic is incendiary, including what his meaning was at that time and what he says now.  What I am trying to avoid is that this person's response to it be fairly treated - in the face of his denials for years since, I think we need to neutrally present what we know of what he said, how others responded at the time, how he replied to that, what the aftermath has been, including his current comments now that he's somewhat come back out into the world. That's all. I don't want to whitewash it, but I don't think it is right for this article to be the place for assumptions and speculations about what he meant.  As I said, it is a state of mind, and we can't know what that was.  
By the way, I do not appreciate or agree at all with your assessment that the main article is either "highly complimentary" or "sanitized"  or your mention of the word "censored".  It is supposed to be a biographical sketch, not a critical  assessment, except in as much as criticism has been notable. ("I don't like his music because I prefer heavy metal" would not be an example of something to be included, I assume you agree.)  I've been one of the editors of the other article for a long time and it is about the totality of the man's life and career, the notability of which originally came from his years as Cat Stevens. The article is balanced and reasonable, covering the negatives arising from his life as Yusuf, but also including mitigating factors (his comments on 9/11, for example) and an attempt at accurate portrayals of things like the denial of entry to the US and its aftermath. It's not perfect, for sure, but it attempts to be balanced, and this article was forked off to here because indeed if the level of detail the people here want was included in the main article about the man's whole life and work, it would have been given undue weight.   So we end up, I hope, with two balanced articles - not an attack piece here and a paean there.  No one is censoring anything, and I don't appreciate the implication of lack of good faith editing. That I might like his music really has nothing to do with my private opinion about his politics (and you actually do not know what that private opinion about his conversion or his political stances afterward  is or was at the time) and it has no bearing on my editing.  
Again, I've removed the NPOV tag, because I think this article is now closer to neutral than it was.  If the edits stand, I'll have no problem keeping the tag off.  If the article returns to POV, I'll put it back. Meanwhile, if people can find ways to expand it with better references, that would be great. Tvoz |talk 21:21, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: response

message: What do you mean by  "Weasel Words"  untouched here?  Tvoz |talk 17:10, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It means I didn't remove what Arrow740 called weasel words. I would have thought that was obvious. --BoogaLouie 00:28, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, obvious - but I thought you were referring to the phrase "what Cole believed to be" which you did change. My mistake. Tvoz |talk 05:05, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  edit summary 

message: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOTSCANDAL#SCANDAL
Wikipedia is not a forum for discussing scandal. It is an encyclopedia. Libel about living figures is one of the things that Jim Wales has been particularly trying to avoid in recent months. If the creators of this article think that some of this material is relevant to Wikipedia's coverage of Cat Stevens, please merge any data into that article, and be prepared to explain yourselves to the folks who write about Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, there. 
I will not get myself into an edit war with you... I did blank the page earlier, and left an appropriate comment as to why it had been blanked. It was not an act of vandalism in the way that the poster from 93.138.88.221 would have wanted to imply. It was rather a conscientious effort to keep Wikipedia on track.
129.19.132.41 (talk) 02:07, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The main article cannot accommodate the level of detail that some editors wanted on this incident, so  consensus was reached among editors of the main article  to have a short summary section in the main article and this forked-off subarticle where more detail could be included.  We did not make that decision to allow anything libelous - it was made to keep the main biography in balance and not skewed with an over-emphasis on one incident in his life.  Unfortunately, the ideal that Wikipedia is not a forum for discussing scandal is not borne out in practice - there are many examples of subarticles created to explore details of scandals or controversial events - see John Edwards extramarital affair and Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories off the top of my head.  So no, we do not want to include anything more over on the main article which is already bursting at its seams, and I believe this subarticle is more or less balanced and not libelous. If editors find problems here, then they should be dealt with here.  That's my view, anyway, as a lead editor on the main article.  Tvoz/talk 22:55, 19 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: This article is inappropriate for Wikipedia

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Removed comment that violates strict BLP rules. Further, we don't allow original research or interpretations.Tvoz/talk 07:35, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:   made statements that were interpreted as endorsing the killing of Rushdie 

message: The link for the story 'The Long War Between Salman Rushdie and Cat Stevens' isn't working for me (gives a timeout error). The article is now on the Atlantics website at https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/11/the-long-war-between-salman-rushdie-and-cat-stevens/339621/ if an editor is interested! (I would change it myself, but I'm not sure what Wikipedia's position is on linking to places that might be paywalled compared to an archived version of the original if that's available.)
Thanks!
142.79.201.94 (talk) 10:37, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Link for Reference