After changing her legal name to Magda Davitt, Irish singer Sinead O’Connor recently announced that she is converting to Islam. She bid farewell to Catholicism and has become a Muslim with a new name: Shuhada Davitt, according to her recent tweet.
“This is to announce that I am proud to have become a Muslim,” she posted on Twitter. “This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam which makes all other scriptures redundant. I will be given (another) new name. It will be ‘Shuhada’.”
The 51-year-old musician, who underwent a major mental health treatment last year, later posted a video clip in which she is reciting the Azaan (call to prayer).
“Here is my first attempt at singing the Azaan,” she captioned the clip. “I got some pronunciation wrong because emotions took me from my page... but there’ll be hundreds of others onstage to come.”
Happy to have turned to Islam and take on the hijab, Shuhada Davitt – as per her new name – is gearing for an EP in collaboration with The Rolling Stones, Irish actor Cillian Murphy, Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason and singer Imelda May. The EP, called One More Yard will pay tribute to a young Irish First World War soldier, Michael Thomas Wall, and uses words from 90 letters he wrote home during the conflict. All proceeds raised from sales of the EP will go to a cancer charity.
