You would have heard of Cat Stevens, and if into saccharine hippie tripe, heard his music. Cat Stevens was one of the 1960's flower power brigade. A typical offering: ``Oh peace train sounding louder/ Glide on the peace train/ Come on now Peace Train/ Yes, peace train heavy roller/ Everyone jump upon the peace train/ Come on now, peace train.'' That's a real no brainer.

Okay, here's the dirt. Cat, in his avatar as Yusuf Islam, is a gung-ho fundamentalist. He heads an organisation named Muslim Aid, which is based in London, and apparently works for the uplift and education of deprived Muslim youth. Of course, it is good for them if they are deprived of his muzak.

Mr Stevens was in Peshawar during mid-to-late 1992. Remember the bomb blasts in Bombay in December 1992-January 1993? Well, the intelligence honchos in the Home Ministry believe that Cat had something to do with them. No, not that they were trying to annihilate his albums, something more serious (and, no, we don't mean another album).

Our sources say that Muslim Aid was ``funding'' the perpetrators of the bombings, along with the surreally named International Brigade for the Spanish Civil War. That, of course, could be another Home Ministry plant. After all, our friends foist enough ``stories'' upon gullible hacks to reverse India's deforestation.

However, they assert that they have bank account numbers and other details, traced to Karachi and Lahore, which substantiate their claim. Yeah right! Their claim to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But, yes, if they are right and for once Indian intelligence is not a contradiction in terms, Mr Stevens is definitely not Mr Nice Guy.

We should tell you a bit more about Mr Stevens' exploits. He sold more than 25 million albums, which means that there are 25 million people out there that are gullible, and tone-deaf to boot. His track record is pretty scratchy. He renounced music in 1979 (or was it the other way around?).

In 1988, he supported Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, the death sentence on author Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. He was summarily thrown off playlists of that minuscule minority that still had him on.

He returned to recording in 1995 with `The Life of the Last Prophet'. Which sunk in the West. However, glory be, it went, right up there, to number 1 on the charts in Turkey (the country, not the bird). That entrancing double-album constituted one disc of Islamic chanting, and another of Stevens, or should we say Brother Yusuf Islam, reading out a 66-minute biography of Muhammad. He said then that he was working on a follow-up album on Bosnia. Fortunately for the Bosnians he hasn't quite kept his threat.

But, hey, the buzz is that Stevens' latest project is titled `Prayers of the Last Prophet'. We'd pray too if Stevens were recording an album about us.