'I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman.'

-- Homer Simpson

HE is wearing petrol-coloured Chelsea boots. Trendier foot-wear, perhaps, than you expect from a Muslim mystic and holy man.

Yusuf Islam, who is also a pop star of lasting quality, remarks upon my jacket. He says that he had a similar Sergeant Pepper-style army jacket back in the Sixties. He bought it on Carnaby Street in London.

Steven Demetre Georgiou, for it is he, was born just across the road from there in the West End which he knew, he says, like the back of his hand. Indeed, he found the sheet music for Morning Has Broken, the old hymn he made into a global hit, in the religious section of a London bookstore once upon a time.

Today, we are padding around a giant TV studio complex in deepest Hertfordshire where he is rehearsing for his world tour (which comes to the 02 Arena in Dublin tonight. He's playing his greatest hits, which I saw in rehearsal, and loved ). Yusuf introduces me to his wife who is wearing a traditional Muslim scarf. Fawzia Ali is, above all, beautiful, and, as I found out, engaging and witty.

EastEnders has a permanent set in the other lot and Big Brother is filmed across the way. Yusuf laughs that Big Brother and its ilk is the end of civilisation as we know it. We go up to a plush dressing room. He asks his wife if there's any chance she could make him "a cuppa". He has a gentle London accent to go with his manner which is unassuming, almost humble.

She makes her husband the cuppa and sits on the opposite sofa in this immaculate, white room while I begin my interview with her husband. She is not known for speaking herself in interviews. So I was surprised when she didn't rebut my attempts to involve her in the conversation.

When I said I was mostly ignorant of Muslim traditions but that Islam does get something of a bad rap when it comes to women, she nodded as if asking me to go on. I said that I had read an article in the New Yorker a few years ago that said that the veil women wear means that women aren't objectified but more importantly, it keeps them sacred. "The veil is a shield for women, a protection," Fawzia Ali says.

"The Koran says women are your garment and you are their garment. It is a protection in the modern world," Yusuf says, adding that "you never see a statue of Mary without a scarf. The issue of motherhood is sacred. When The Prophet was asked by somebody, 'Who shall I give my respect to and consider the most in my life?' he said, 'Your mother.' 'Who next?' 'Your mother.' 'And who next?' 'Your mother.' Three times. The respect for family and the relationship between husband and wife has to be protected. If you don't believe in God in the first place, wear what you want."

Lest we forget, her husband sued and won unspecified libel damages and an apology from a news agency in 2008 which published an article that claimed he would speak only to veiled women at an awards ceremony. The lie was further compounded by the fact that 10 minutes before our interview Yusuf was speaking to tour manager Juliette who was in a relatively revealing top and jeans.

Fawzia Ali asks me: "What's the best time to see Ireland?"

In two years, when the recession ends, I joke.

Yusuf practically falls on the floor with laughter. "I went there in my early days," he said. "I did open The Islamic Centre in Dublin in the Eighties or the early Nineties as one of the chief guests."

Asked how he envisages Ireland, he says he thinks of "family, incredible passion, the colour green and lovely, beautiful music".

"Oh, we love Irish music," Fawzia Ali says.

It is impossible not to like Yusuf Islam. He is gentle as a breeze. You can see why he is responsible for such beautiful works of music as Peace Train, The First Cut Is The Deepest, Father And Son (murdered in a cover version form by Boyzone), Moonshadow and Hard Headed Woman. Yusuf takes the philosophical view now that getting refused entry to United States in 2004 because his name was on a no-fly list created to fight terrorism "happened for a reason". (US Homeland Security placed Yusuf Islam on the no-fly list in response to information received from the intelligence community.)

Yusuf says of that highly controversial incident: "I returned to my place of innocence. I said to God, 'You got me here! I'll leave it to you!'" Yusuf laughs. "I had that trust. In fact, what happened was a giant turnaround and it worked in my favour in the end. It was only a few months later that Gorbachev was giving me a peace award in Rome. That shows you the reward of those who trust. I decided to write a song about what happened, Boots & Sand, which Paul McCartney and Dolly Parton joined in on which was great fun. There are a lot of serious things going on in the world but sometimes you have to lighten up."

"All things will pass," he says of the war in Iraq.

Asked what he would say to people who are downcast because of the economic recession appearing never to pass, Yusuf smiles and says that "it is good that the bankers are getting identified. We can see the antagonists a bit more clearly now."

The Bible says it is easier for a camel to go through the head of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven.

"In the Koran," he says, "it says it is more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than a thick rope to pass through the eye of a needle. One is incredibly more logical."

Most of the world knows the man I am talking to today as Cat Stevens. He wrote and released many timeless classics. He became a pop star at 18 with I Love My Dog. (Looking back at him then it is difficult to discern any promise of what was to come.) Then in December of 1977, he converted to the Islamic faith and thereafter became Yusuf Islam. His involvement with the music business ended entirely for almost three decades as he devoted himself to religion and family.

Back in the late Sixties he had a physical breakdown and contracted TB.

"Life hits you and you get hurt and you get broken and then you try to mend yourself," he says, looking back on that time. "TB was a big lesson. But it was to do with a psychological state of mind where people are controlling you. The biggest thing I got out of tuberculosis was I realised I was being controlled by the music business. There were so many people who were hanging on to me and driving me like a slave to enrich themselves. I had to take control. I had to become the master of my own art because art was my way of travelling and learning."

The young Cat Stevens wanted to be a pop star but when he became one, it almost destroyed him. "And I wanted more until I realised I wasn't going to get it if I wasn't alive," he laughs. "And therefore I had to start thinking more comprehensively about my life in my body and spirit, and in some ways the transcendental path helps you fix the body issue as well because you get quite healthy: vegetarian food, looking at what you are intaking and eating and consciousness."

One of the problems for Yusuf was, he says, to find the point of gravitation between his father's Greek Cypriot side and his mother's Swedish side, which was Baptist. "And then being born in the middle of the West End. And then they sent me to the best school around the corner which was Roman Catholic." It did build in to him a certain religious tolerance, he says, because he wasn't "dogmatically anything".

His conversion to Islam was hastened by an incident on the coast of California in 1976. At first he doesn't seem keen to acknowledge that almost drowning was the trigger. "When you are faced with death you don't know, you don't know whether it is or not [a trigger to convert to Islam]," he says. "It doesn't matter. At that point came the help. The wave took me back. Then I forgot. But God doesn't forget!" he laughs.

"There were many times I tried to walk away from the business. I was at a party in LA when this foolish fella bought me, as a joke, a straitjacket. That was a breaking point. I ran away from my own party. I walked out into the wilderness of LA. That was before the epiphany in the ocean. It is an epiphany because God speaks in whatever form through phenomena like a wave."

When he walked away from the music industry, he says he had thought about maybe existing as a singer on a different level, that is outside of the music business.

"But you need inspiration for that. And that wasn't in my hands any more. I was more concerned with more rudimentary issues like having to reform my life and just generally changing my life."

He hadn't become a father at this stage. "That was part of it," he says. "I had to go and get married." He didn't want to be a pop-star dad. He now has five children with Fawzia Ali. "It was one of our children who prompted Yusuf to go back into music," says Fawzia Ali, no hard-headed woman by any stretch of the imagination.

"He was the key to my return to music in 2000 in Dubai," Yusuf says.

"But you can't be a good Muslim and at the same time be in the middle of all this dirge," he says. "The music business has many corruptive elements." He says he keeps the balance in his life with "charity" and God. Religious faith is such an intimate thing that it is difficult to bring it out into the open. There is no doubt that Yusuf is defined primarily by his relationship with God (followed by the relationship with his wife and children, and then his music).

"The deeper and the higher you go," he says, "the closer you get, because in no way can you reach the perfection of God and in no way can you ever be removed from reality which is right here. God is all pervasive."

In 2006, Yusuf stepped back into the music business albeit under his terms. "I was the old me again -- but without the tinkle dust of stardom, of the music business."

William Butler Yeats has a poem with the line, "I'm looking for the face I had. Before the world was made."

"Absolutely," Yusuf concurs. "And when you rediscover your face you realise you have been scarred, you have been affected, but ultimately, the inner self is still the same as the one you were born with. You just have to get back to that place of trust. Kids have an immense trust."

If anything, Yusuf has that childish quality too. When I ask him about his favourite singers, he sings me some Tom Waits and his wife smiles, clearly in love.

I ask him about favourite films. He turns to Fawzia Ali. The conversation that ensues is beautiful in its unintentional comical simplicity. It also says something very simple about how much they love each other.

Him: "What are the movies I watch again and again?"

Her: "The one with the guy who's on the desert island? Tom Hanks?"

Him: "No, no, that's not it! My wife is slipping!" he laughs. "No, I like that too, but I'm talking about the sea movie with Russell Crowe ... "

Me: "Do you mean Master and Commander?"

Him: "Yes, that's it!"

Me: "Isn't it a bit macho?"

Him: "Yes, I suppose, but I love the music and the violins! It's incredible."

So is Yusuf Islam.

Yusuf Islam plays his first ever Irish date in The O2 tonight. A limited number of tickets are still available. Contact Ticketmaster on 081-8719300 or at www.ticketmaster.ie