Cat Stevens' Comments About Salman Rushdie - Criticism and Backlash

Criticism and Backlash

Stevens/Islam's comments caused a backlash at the time. The pop group 10,000 Maniacs deleted the Cat Stevens song "Peace Train," which they had recorded for their 1987 In My Tribe album, from subsequent pressings of their album as a protest against Stevens/Islam's remarks. Several US stations stopped playing Cat Stevens records. Radio talk show host Tom Leykis of KFI-AM in Los Angeles called for a mass burning of Cat Steven's records, later changed to a mass steamrolling. Islam claimed that he had earlier unsuccessfully asked his record company to stop the release of his Cat Stevens records but they refused on economic grounds.

Commenting on the controversy regarding the United States government's 2004 refusal to allow Stevens/Islam to enter the country, Middle East scholar Juan Cole criticized Stevens/Islam, saying he "never forgave him for advocating the execution of Salman Rushdie," and claiming Stevens/Islam "later explained this position away by saying that he did not endorse vigilante action against Rushdie, but would rather want the verdict to be carried out by a proper court."

Salman Rushdie himself, in a letter to the editor of The Daily Telegraph that was published on 6 May 2007, complained of what he believed was Yusuf's attempts to "rewrite his past," and calls his claims of innocence "rubbish." On 24 November 2010, in an interview on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight on CBC Television Rushdie was asked about Yusuf's appearance at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, DC the previous month. He said, "I thought it was a mistake to have invited him and I actually called up Jon Stewart and we had a couple of conversations and I think, you know, by the end of it I think he's pretty clear that it was probably a misstep. Because he's not a good guy.... He hasn't been Cat Stevens for a long time, you know. He's a different guy now."
Stewart himself commented in 2012: "We get into a whole conversation, and it becomes very clear to me that he is straddling two worlds in a very difficult way. And that he actually still – and it broke my heart a little bit. I wish I had known that. I wouldn’t have done, I don’t think. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have done it. Because that to me is a deal breaker. Death for free speech is a deal breaker."

Also soon after the Stewart episode, The Atlantic reviewed the "long war" between Rushdie and Yusuf in brief, including reference to Stanford literary blogger Cynthia Haven's chronicle of "the entire thing, including a bizarre and apparently ongoing side-conflict involving YouTube videos and copyright complaints" and more response by Rushdie to the Yusuf appearance.