V.S. Naipaul once said that ancestral memories are like “trap doors to a bottomless past”. This was my first thought when I heard about the death of HH Prince Karim Aga Khan, the 49th Imam Zaman of Islam’s Ismaili sect and unquestionably the world leader who has inspired me most in my lifetime. I am not an Ismaili. In fact, my direct ancestor, the Mukhi of Calcutta Jamat in 1837, led a tax revolt/property dispute against the 1st Aga Khan when Lord Auckland invited him to flee Qajar Persia for the protection of the British Crown. We are known as Sunni Ismailis but the Khoja Sunnat Jamat is miniscule while the Ismaili Imamate runs history’s biggest development network across Africa, the Arab world, South Asia and the ancient Ismaili enclaves in Tajikistan, Hunza and Afghanistan.
Prince Karim was a man any human being should be proud to call Hazar Imam. A Harvard history graduate (Kirkland House ’58), an Olympic skier and medalist for Iran at the Innsbruck Winter Games, a powerful force for liberal values, gender equality, women’s empowerment and education across the Islamic world, a patron of art, music and culture akin to the Medici clan of Renaissance Florence. Prince Karim was unquestionably the world’s most successful social venture capitalist, a true cosmopolitan humanist in the best traditions of the Islamic enlightenment his grandfather Sir Sultan Aga Khan midwifed in the Victorian Dickensian Bombay of the late 1890’s.
I knew nothing about all this when I was a little boy and saw the pictures of a young Prince Karim with his wife Sally, an English lady who wore a saree but spoke perfect Urdu. The name Aga Khan was spoken frequently in our house as my maternal grandfather had done legal work for Sir Sultan and his son Aly Solomon in pre-partition Bombay and Poona.
The founder of Pakistan was also born in an Ismaili clan in Karachi in 1876 and Sir Sultan was born a stone’s throw from my father’s house on a hilltop mansion called Honeymoon Lodge in 1877. As a boy, my cronies and I used to roam the hills with our Dyna air-guns and once crept up to peer in the shuttered windows to see if it was haunted. I even thought the Aga Khans were somehow related to our local dictators du jour Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan LOL! Thankfully they were not.
Trump and Musk have signed the death sentence for untold poor children in the Third World’s most desperate hearts of darkness. The only hope the world’s poor kids have for survival against the war launched on them by the planet’s richest man and most powerful President is the exquisite Aga Khan Development Network, founded by Sir Sultan’s socioeconomic community institutions in 1920’s Bombay/Kutch/Sind and that metastasized into Prince Karim’s unique AKFED four decades later. How many Indians know that a Muslim leader was the President of the League of Nations in the late 1930’s when the storm clouds of war darkened over Europe?
The Aga Khan’s family were diplomats and peacemakers in the pinnacle of the game of nations over the past 100 years. Prince Karim rescued the Ismailis of Uganda from Idi Amin’s pogroms and resettled them in his friend Pier Trudeau’s Canada. He alone helped the Ismailis of Salamiya survive the horrors of Baathist Syria. The Fatimid Caliphate founded Al-Azhar University and the first mental health hospital in the Islamic world six centuries before witches were publicly burnt at the stake in Europe and yes, America (Salem).
RIP Prince Karim, I loved you and mourn you as your people do all over the word. Your life honoured the luminous bloodline into which you were born.
Also published on Medium.
