Creativity Quote by Cat Stevens

Stevens is doing something more politically deft than it looks: he’s naming an external villain (the media) while refusing to let Muslims off the hook for internal fracture. The sentence is built like a two-handed chord. One hand points outward at portrayal - the flattening of Islam into a security problem, a punchline, or an unexamined “other” in British news cycles. The other hand points inward at “tribal separations,” a deliberately provocative phrase that concedes how community divisions can calcify into identity brands, sect labels, and neighborhood boundaries that make collective response harder.

The intent is partly protective, partly corrective. As a public figure who converted and has long been treated as a stand-in for “the Muslim celebrity,” Stevens speaks from the pressure point where personal faith meets national suspicion. In the UK context - especially post-9/11, 7/7, and the long afterlife of the “integration” debate - “portrayal” isn’t a soft issue. It shapes policy mood, surveillance common sense, schoolyard hostility, hiring decisions. He’s arguing that representation is infrastructure.

The subtext is an admonition about feedback loops: hostile media narratives don’t just misinform the majority; they incentivize Muslims to retreat into smaller, safer in-groups, which then gets reported as self-segregation, which hardens the original story. “I suppose” reads as strategic modesty - a hedge that signals reasonableness - but the claim is blunt: the community’s biggest battles are fought in the story-space and in the mirror.