[Cowperson]

A plane bound for Washington from London was diverted to Maine on Tuesday after passenger Yusuf Islam -- formerly known as pop singer Cat Stevens -- showed up on a U.S. watch list, federal officials said.

Upon reaching Maine, he was denied entry into the USA.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/09/21/plane.div...d.ap/index.html

Too paranoid?

Or . . .

Cat Stevens had his first big hit at 19, and had sold 40 million records a decade later. But shortly after his 1977 conversion, he distanced himself sharply from his music, publicly auctioning off his guitars (giving the proceeds to a Muslim charity) announcing that he would not sing again.

He embraced his new religion with a zeal common in converts, and signed on to many of its political trappings. In the 1980's, he supported the death sentence issued against author Salman Rushdie; during the Persian Gulf war he spoke sympathetically of his "Muslim brother", Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Most recently, he joined a campaign in Britain to maintain a ban on homosexuality in schools.

Lately, he's softened his stance:

First, he has realized that the theological stricture on music is not what he first thought upon his conversion.

"This issue of music in Islam is not as cut and dried as I was led to believe," he said. "I relied on heresy, that was perhaps my mistake." His first Islamic teachers taught that music "represents frivolity and time-wasting", but he has since come to understand that it can serve a purpose. It was the music of Bosnian Muslims, which he first heard during the war in Yugoslavia, the music of the people who had lost everything else, which first helped him to understand this.

http://www.majicat.com/yusufislam/torontoglobe.htm

Cowperson