Cat Stevens and his three near-death experiences: “I had to bow down”
When Cat Stevens ditched music in 1977, he said it was because he “needed to get real”. Converting to Islam, for him, was a chance to pursue that which actually made sense and give him a greater sense of purpose. But the decision didn’t just come from nowhere.
When you’re already famous for being a world-class singer-songwriter with songs that resonate across all eras and generations, not everyone is going to understand a sudden decision to step back from it all. But while countless others found their own paths to self-discovery through Stevens’ words, a series of events ultimately led him to take a journey of his own, away from the chaos of the industry.
This journey actually began in the 1960s, when Stevens, as delinquent and curious about the world as any other youth in London, started climbing around on rooftops. One evening, however, he slipped while jumping between rooftops, leaving him hanging on “by his fingertips”. His friend was able to pull him back and save him from “the dark abyss”, but it didn’t stop all the morbid rumination that came after.
“I already considered myself as a thinker by then and, as such, you can’t help thinking that one day you won’t be here,” Stevens pondered in his memoir, Cat on the Road to Findout. “Whether it’s through an accident or illness or by dying in your sleep, it’s all one thing. You leave this world.”
Although the singer would’ve probably liked his brush with death to have stopped there, he then contracted tuberculosis in his teens. At the London Clinic, where he would recover for months, he endured a “hellish three-month defensive battle for my earthly future”… Then, a handful of years later, Stevens was once again faced with the pesky reality of mortality when he nearly drowned swimming off the coast of Malibu.
Stevens later recalled how, at the time, he was so desperate for survival that he promised god he would work for him if he saved his life… Call it fate, karma, or an act of divine intervention itself, he was then saved by a sudden wave that helped carry him towards land – this, along with receiving a copy of the Quran from his brother, led to Stevens retiring from music and converting to Islam.
“I would never have picked up a Quran,” the singer mused to Desert Island Disks. “But it became the gateway. After a year, I could not hold myself back. I had to bow down.”
Granted, it wasn’t easy leaving music behind. In fact, Stevens battled with what most musicians would face if they decided to hang up their hats, but with the additional challenge of the world’s hostility about a decision they couldn’t understand. Western audiences, in particular, didn’t let him go easy, and he felt a “responsibility” to satisfy his fans. But, at the same time, he had to “start taking action with what I now believed”.
And while he sort of naively thought that people would get it, a lot of them argued that he should continue making music. But it wasn’t like Stevens would ditch it forever – he merely needed an escape to figure out his own path in life before it felt right to pick up his guitar once more. And when he finally did, he was “flowing with ideas”.
Music, to Stevens, was always his greatest outlet, and so taking time away only strengthened that connection… What’s more, it allowed him to fall in love with the art all over again, realising why he pursued it in the first place: to feel closer to his real purpose – as he put it, “I didn’t know where I was going, but music helped me to get there.”
