Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie
[2][3] Islam also said that later in the same programme he promised to accept the judgment of a British court if it found Rushdie innocent of any crime, blasphemy or otherwise.
"[4] Newspapers quickly denounced what was seen as Yusuf Islam's support for the killing of Rushdie and the next day, he released a statement saying that he was not personally encouraging anybody to be a vigilante,[2] and that he was only stating that blasphemy is a capital offence according to the Qur'an.
"[8] According to Islam, his last comments on the innocence of Rushdie were not a joke: Providentially, they kept in one important response to a final question posed directly to me by Geoffrey Robertson QC.
At the end of the debate he asked me to imagine if Salman Rushdie was taken to court in Britain and the Jury found him 'not guilty' of any crime – blasphemy or otherwise – and dismissed the case, what I would do.
At a lecture, back in 1989, I was asked a question about blasphemy according to Islamic Law, I simply repeated the legal view according to my limited knowledge of the Scriptural texts, based directly on historical commentaries of the Qur'an.
[3]In October 2020, Islam appeared on the BBC's Desert Island Discs and said: I was certainly not prepared or equipped to deal with shark-toothed journalists and the whole way in which the media spins stories.
[9]On his personal spiritual website he wrote: I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini—and still don’t.
When asked about my opinion regarding blasphemy, I could not tell a lie and confirmed that – like both the Torah and the Gospel – the Qur'an considers it, without repentance, as a capital offense.
In response, Stevens released a statement on his social media accounts condemning the attack and wishing Rushdie a full recovery.
[13] Commenting on the controversy regarding the United States government's 2004 refusal to allow Islam to enter the country, Middle East scholar Juan Cole criticised him, saying that he "never forgave him [Stevens] for advocating the execution of Salman Rushdie," and claiming he had "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.
"[14] Rushdie himself, in a 2007 letter to the editor of The Daily Telegraph, complained of what he believed was Islam's attempts to "rewrite his past," and called his claims of innocence "rubbish.
"[15] In November 2010, in an interview on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight on CBC Television Rushdie was asked about Islam's appearance at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C. 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.
"[17][18] In the 23 April 2014, episode of The Daily Show, Stewart stated unequivocally that inviting Islam was a "mistake" and that he "should have looked into it more.
"[19] Soon after Stewart made those comments, The Atlantic reviewed the "long war" between Rushdie and Islam 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 Islam appearance.
