The third time Yusuf Islam, then known best as the singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, almost died, he didn’t tell anyone.
His first near-death experience had been as a gallivanting teen, when he slipped while jumping between British rooftops, only to be caught by his best friend an instant before the plummet. His second had come at 20, when doctors diagnosed him, then a pinup pop star, with tuberculosis after he began coughing blood onto his piano.
Late in 1975, soon after Islam turned 27, his career seemed to be flagging. While he waited for lunch with his manager and label boss in Malibu, Calif., he decided to swim in the Pacific. After 15 minutes in the cold water, he tried to head back, only to find that the current was sweeping him to sea.
“I thought I could swim well, but I could not fight or beat the ocean. I had only seconds left,” Islam, 77, said recently during a video interview from a rented London apartment. So he prayed, insisting that, if he lived, he would work for God. A wave pushed him forward. “When I realized my vulnerability, what else could I do? My body was disappearing. I had only my soul left.”
Islam had been a spiritual seeker since his tuberculosis battle, reading Buddhist studies like “The Secret Path” and flirting with numerology and yoga in a quest to answer what he called “serious, serious questions about your existence.” A few months after he nearly drowned, his older brother, David, gave him a copy of the Quran after being struck by the serenity inside a Jerusalem mosque. As soon as the musician read the first few pages, he knew he had found the way to fulfill his prayer’s promise.
“If I was doing a tour, I would be in my hotel room, door locked and reading,” he said. “I knew the impact this would have, but I wasn’t worried. I was too interested in my soul.”
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