Songfacts®:

• This is a story that has been told and retold time and time again, in literature, verse, and of course in music.
  
  Bill Parkinson's song is about his own mother. One of the finest of the genre, it has been recorded in many languages, but even if he had envisaged its success, he wouldn't have recorded it simultaneously in four languages.
  
  Although he was born in Tehran, Yusuf regards English as his first language and acknowledges it as the lingua franca of the known universe. In addition to Farsi, the language of the land of his birth, the song was recorded in Turkish, and as he is a devout Moslem, there should be no surprise that the fourth version is in Arabic, the language of the Holy Qur'an.
  
  It is, though, obviously not a song directed to his own mother because its tone is that of a condemned man sitting in his cell rather than that of an alumnus of the Royal Academy of Music. That being said, it is a song that will strike a chord with many people, especially those who are or have been estranged from their mothers. It was released as a single download on Mother's Day, 2005. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England