The year of the cat. Yusuf Islam – formerly Cat Stevens – is back with a new album and is even playing concerts again. So what’s changed over the past 3. I have grown wiser and my beard is longer,’ he tells Nigel Farndale. To call it a split personality would be to overstate the case, but there is a measure of contradiction pulsing through Yusuf Islam’s character.

I see it when he arrives for a photographic shoot at Leighton House, near Holland Park in west London. The gallery has been chosen as a setting because of its Arab hall – an appropriate backdrop for Britain’s best- known Muslim convert. Although he was born in London 5.

Islam’s first visit here and, as he maunders around the hall, examining its Islamic tiles, he looks like an Eastern mystic: serene and greybearded in a kameez shirt, his hands forming a fig leaf behind his back; he is nodding to himself and silently mouthing translations of Arabic phrases he reads on the walls. But when the shoot begins and he is asked to sit on the mosaic floor, he shakes his head. The temperature changes. He has become the veteran pop star once more, aware of his image, used to getting his own way. He doesn’t want to look ‘hunched up’, he says, holding up his hand to silence any objection. The song You’re So Vain by his one- time girlfriend Carly Simon was said to have been written about him. Then again, it was said to have been written about a lot of Seventies rock stars.

Vanity was one of my problems,’ is all Yusuf Islam will say on the subject now. He pointedly uses the past tense – was – to refer to the days when, under the name Cat Stevens, he sold more than 6. Washington just to get his teeth capped, and, in the memorable phrase of one of his associates,‘wasn’t exactly celibate’. The present tense is for what happened after 1. He auctioned his guitars and gold records for Islamic charities. He even wrote to his record company and asked it to stop selling his albums (it refused).

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More significantly, he changed his name and dedicated himself to founding Muslim schools in north London – four of them to date.‘There is a cultural difference between what I represented as Cat Stevens and what I represent today as Yusuf Islam,’ he says carefully, with a trace of London in his vowels. He says everything with care and films himself saying it. There is a small microphone strapped to his arm, its neon light glowing, and it is wirelessly linked to a video camera he has placed in the corner of the room. He seems earnest, sincere and defensive. He has good reason to be. In 1. 98. 9, he was quoted as saying that, according to a literal interpretation of the Koran, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was understandable, sort of.

A media storm broke and he claimed he was misquoted, or at least his meaning was wilfully misconstrued. He has recorded his every public utterance since. His manager – with a new album, his first in 2.

Iraq, which might seem a little eccentric, given that Yusuf Islam is a pop star. But I know what he means. Whether he likes it or not, Islam has been cast in the role of unofficial ambassador for Britain’s two million Muslims, and in recent years that has not been the easiest gig in the world. On the CD box of his new album,‘An Other Cup’, his former stage name is, perhaps with some weariness, acknowledged on a sticker. He can’t get away from it, it seems. But even if it wasn’t there, you would know straight away it was Cat Stevens you were listening to: a semitone lower, but the same folksy, fluid, easy- going vocals and acoustic guitar patterns – a patina familiar from songs such as Moonshadow, Father and Son, Peace Train, The First Cut is the Deepest and, that staple of school assemblies, Morning Has Broken. Cat Stevens has a long and impressive back catalogue, so long and impressive that it has kept him in royalties for life.

As with his name, the old songs just won’t go away. On the morning I meet him he has just been told that Wild World (‘Oh, baby, baby it’s a…’ – that one) has re- entered the Top 4. Pods, the song having just featured on a youth television programme.

His Tea for the Tillerman, meanwhile, has re- entered the collective consciousness thanks to Ricky Gervais: he uses it as the theme tune to Extras. The ‘why now after 2.

He and his wife, Fauzia Mubarak Ali, the daughter of a Surbiton accountant, have five children. One of them, his 2. Muhammad, brought a guitar into the house and started writing songs on it. Islam had assumed that his religion frowned on music. But my son helped me come to a better understanding of where music sits in Islamic culture and I found myself free to sing again.’So there was no taboo about it, after all? My son broke the taboo for me, because he had no hesitation in buying a guitar.

He is a Muslim, too. It made me realise again that music helps us to share moments.’ He nods thoughtfully. Islam had planned to make a one- off return to music in 1. Live Aid but – tuh!

Elton John over- ran and he was squeezed out of the schedule. Watch Free Boundin`. Had he not even been singing to himself in the shower in all that time? No, no, no. I really walked away from the business. It was a statement in a way because I felt a kind of rejection from the media the moment I adopted a new name.

They didn’t really want to know me. They wanted me to remain as I was. When I received a cold shoulder at this turning point in my life I felt: well, if you don’t love me then maybe I don’t love you.’He didn’t love himself much either, presumably, given that he had changed his identity in such a profound way. I got to the point, like many a pop star, when I thought the world rotated around me. Islam put me in a spot where I realised I had to bow to a higher power and simply dedicate myself to living properly.

Without guidelines that is difficult to do.’His conversion occurred after he nearly drowned off the coast of Malibu in 1. A strong current was pulling him out to sea and, having no strength left, he said, ‘God, if you save me, I’ll work for you.’At that moment, a wave came and he was saved. When I ask him how he was sure it was Allah who had answered his prayers and not the Christian God of his Catholic upbringing, he smiles and says, ‘There is only one God.’ He had been reading the Koran at the time.

A coach party of 2. Islam is recognised by a Muslim man who wants to shake his hand. He gets that a lot, he says. He always feels at home in cafés. His father ran one in Soho. Born Steven Demetre Georgiou, he was the son of Stavros, a Greek- Cypriot, and Ingrid, a Swedish Baptist. When Steven was about eight years old, his parents separated, but both continued to run the restaurant and live above it.

Islam says he was forever trying, and failing, to reconcile them. His father was known as ‘Belos’ – The Mad One – because he had a short temper. Was the appeal of Islam for him partly paternalistic? Yeah, but there is a central dimension to Islam which a lot of people don’t see. They see the external, which can look paternalistic, but there is an internal perspective of knowing your Lord. I don’t think any prophet ever came except to connect people to the one Lord. Once you see there is only one Lord then you realise you are not the boss, you have to serve.’You learn humility?

Humility. Exactly. Not often associated with pop stars. That is the character change I had to go through. For that reason, standing on stage in front of 4.

He didn’t enjoy the applause? Some introverts overcome their problem by exhibiting themselves publicly.

I think Jimi Hendrix was the same. He was a very shy person. Mmm. To know him, he was a very gentle speaker but his image required him to be a big personality.’Cat Stevens toured with Hendrix in the late 1. Hendrix, indeed, had helped him overcome his stage fright – he gave him a pint of brandy mixed with port to drink every night before he went on. Does he ever shake his head at the thought that he hung out with Hendrix and somehow survived?

Yes, well, that was one of the strange things. There was a lot of clubbing and drug- taking going on.