CanWest News - © CanWest News Service 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
By: Richard Foot - CanWest News Service
Leader laments global divisions as Ismaili Muslims mark Golden Jubilee
He is the antithesis of the stereotypical Islamic imam - he wears business suits and silk ties instead of robes and turbans, owns a fancy yacht club in Sardinia, and oversees a multibillion-dollar economic empire that stretches from Switzerland to South Africa and beyond.
But what really sets the 70-year-old Aga Khan apart from many other high-profile Islamic leaders is the affection he often expresses for Jews and Christians.
“The faith of Islam, in the vast majority of its interpretations, is not in conflict with the other great Abrahamic traditions,” he said in a speech last month in Paris.
“Instead of shouting at one another, our faiths ask us to listen, and learn from one another. As we do, one of our first lessons might well centre on those powerful but often neglected chapters in history when Islamic and European cultures interacted co-operatively and creatively to realize some of civilization’s peak achievements.”
On Wednesday, the world’s 15 million Ismaili Muslims will celebrate the Aga Khan’s 50 years of spiritual leadership of their small, but powerful Islamic sect.
In Canada, an estimated 80,000 Ismailis are expected to gather at large, private meetings in cities across the country to pray and feast, and to help kick off their leader’s historic golden jubilee.
The two biggest celebrations in this country will take place in Toronto, home to about 30,000 Ismailis, and in Vancouver, home to another 15,000.
“It is a tradition within the Ismaili community to commemorate epochal events in the life of our imams,” says Amir Karim, a Montreal-based businessman and a volunteer with the Ismaili Council for Canada.
Throughout his Jubilee year, the Aga Khan will travel to Canada and a dozen other countries, dispensing development aid, opening schools and cultural centres, and advancing his belief that the terrible tension that now divides the Islamic world and the West is less a sign of “clashing civilizations” than a symptom of deep ignorance on both sides.
“I am deeply convinced that the fundamental roots of this crisis are infinitely more political than they are theological,” he said in Paris on June 15.
“Yes, many of the problems,” he said, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, “have since taken on the colouring if interfaith conflict, but that development is the consequence, much more than the cause, of these tragedies.
“Bringing peace and order to this complex situation will require great subtlety, patience, understanding and knowledge. Sadly, none, I repeat none, of these requirements are sufficiently available amongst the main players today. There is clumsiness, not subtlety, there is impatience, not patience, there is a massive deficit in understanding and an enormous knowledge vacuum.”
Perhaps no human being is better placed to try to soften the rising antagonism between Islamic nations and the West.
Ismaili Muslims are arguably the most liberal, westernized, and educated of all Islamic sects.
They see no contradiction in following western customs and business principles, while at the same time following the teachings of the Qur’an.
Resented and persecuted through history, including by many fellow Muslims, they have been called the “Jews of the Islamic world.”
The current Aga Khan was born as Prince Karim in 1936 into a family considered by Ismailis to be direct descendants of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed. He grew up in Kenya and Switzerland in a world of wealth and privilege.
His grandfather was Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Khan, the third Aga Khan, a flamboyant figure and statesman from colonial India, who urged the Muslim world to support the Allied cause in the First World War and in 1937 became president of the League of Nations.
The Aga Khan III also helped mediate India’s independence from Britain after the Second World War, but was best known in the West for the way he raised money - by climbing onto a set of scales in public and having his impressive weight matched pound for pound by donations of gold and gems.
In 1957, at the age of 20, the Aga Khan III bestowed his title and responsibilities onto Prince Karim, bypassing Karim’s playboy father, Prince Aly Khan, who was married to actress Rita Hayworth and who later died in a car crash in Paris in 1960.
The Aga Khan IV has been no stranger himself to the paparazzi and to tabloid headlines, thanks in part to his own marriages to glamourous women, his expensive racehorses, and his lavish European lifestyle.
For 50 years, from his grand estate outside Paris, the Aga Khan has overseen the growth and good works of a worldwide business and charitable empire.
He is chairman of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, a company that employs more than 36,000 people on four continents and owns a network of businesses, from a multimillion-dollar hydroelectric project in Uganda, to micro-credit institutions that lend money to the poorest people in Asia, to a five-star hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The Aga Khan Fund is actually one of Afghanistan’s most influential economic players, owning Roshan, the country’s biggest mobile phone company with 1.3-million subscribers.
The fund’s web of businesses generate about $1.5 billion US in annual revenues, but as the Aga Khan recently told the New York Times, building businesses “is part of the ethics of the faith.”
The Aga Khan also leads the Aga Khan Development Network, one of the world’s largest aid and cultural organizations, which spends more than $300 million US a year building schools, universities and hospitals in the Third World, and hosting cultural exhibitions around the globe.
The network is heavily involved in East Africa, from where many of Canada’s Ismailis came in the 1970s, after being persecuted, along with the rest of the East Indian population, in Uganda and Kenya.
The Aga Khan appears to have a soft spot for Canada, not only because this country welcomed so many Ismaili immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s, but because of what he has lovingly called “the most pluralistic country on the face of the Earth.”
Last year, he travelled to Ottawa to announce his decision to build - along with the federal government, in the old mansion near Parliament Hill that once housed the Canadian War Museum - the Global Centre for Pluralism, a think-tank dedicated to promoting “culturally diverse societies.”
“Life in Canada isn’t perfect,” says Amir Karim, “but at least Canada has structures and institutions to support the idea of diversity and pluralism. At least Canada is striving for it. His Highness is hoping to take the Canadian model and export it around the world.”