Sinead O’Connor Announces Conversion to Islam, New Name

Irish singer Sinead O’Connor announced this month that she has converted to Islam and adopted the new name Shuhada’ Davitt. The 51-year-old has been sharing selfies of herself wearing hijabs recently, as well as video in which she sang the Azan, or call to prayer.

“This is to announce that I am proud to have come a Muslim. This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam. Which makes all other scriptures redundant,” she tweeted on Oct. 19. “I will be given (another) new name. It will be Shuhada’.”

Last year, she legally changed her name to Magda Davitt.

In the video of herself singing the Azan, she wrote, “Here is my 1st attempt at singing the Azan. I got some [pronunciation] wrong because emotions took me from my page… but there’ll be hundreds of others onstage to come…”

On Thursday, O’Connor thanked her “Muslim brothers and sisters” for accepting her into their faith.

“Thank you so much to all my Muslim brothers and sisters who have been so kind as to welcome me to Ummah today on this page. You can’t begin to imaging how much your tenderness means to me,” she wrote, adding several red heart emojis. She also retweeted several encouraging messages.

O’Connor, who famously ripped up a photo of John Paul II during a Saturday Night Live appearance in 1992, has struggled publicly with mental illness.

Last August, fans worried for her when she recorded a tearful video from a motel room in New Jersey in which she said she suffers from “three mental illnesses” and slammed her family members, who she said left her alone in the world.

In May 2016, authorities searched for the “Nothing Compares 2 U” singer after she left a cryptic note on Facebook and went out for a bike ride. A concerned doctor called police and asked them to perform a well-being check. Six months before that, in November 2015, she was hospitalized after she posted what appeared to be a suicide note on Facebook and took an overdose.

She was diagnosed more than 10 years ago as bipolar, which she has spoken openly about in the past. She told Oprah Winfrey in 2007 that she struggled with anxiety and suicidal thoughts before her diagnosis, and that while medications helping her, “it’s a work in progress.”

In an interview with Time magazine after she protested Pope John Paul II on SNL, she said she was motivated to do so by the Catholic Church’s record on child abuse. In 1999, she was ordained a priest by Bishop Michael Cox of the Catholic Latin Tridentine Church in Lourdes, France, when she was renamed Mother Bernadette Mary. The Church dismissed the ordination at the time as “bizarre and absurd.”

Earlier this year, Prince’s ex-wife Maybe Garcia slammed O’Connor after O’Connor told police that the late music icon was violent toward women and that he abused hard drugs. Garcia, who was married to Prince from 1996 to 2000, told TMZ that Prince was never violent with her and that she never saw him be violent with anyone. She also said that he didn’t partake in any hard drugs while they were married, and that she saw him drunk only once.

The comments came days after police made public audio from an interview between O’Connor and Carver County police that took place less than two weeks after Prince’s April 2016 death.

“He had been extremely violent to a number of women in his life, including myself, and several women were put in the hospital while Prince was under the effects of these medications,” she said.

“I’ve seen him in very frightening conditions after using drugs,” O’Connor said. “Now, I cannot say that I ever saw him use the drugs. I never saw him actually take them. He would retire to another room to take whatever the drugs were. When he would come out of the room, he would be very violent, very aggressive. His eyeballs would disappear, literally, from his eyes. They vanished.”