By Malise Ruthven (former journalist with the BBC World Service, lecturer at universities on both sides of the Atlantic and author of books on Islam, including Islam in the World)
Prince Karim al-Husseini Aga Khan IV was a man of remarkable paradoxes: a sultan without territory, a billionaire socialite and real-estate developer who eschewed a life of ease, a newspaper proprietor who permitted unconditional editorial freedom, a spiritual leader who urged his followers to seek questions rather than answers, and a polymath who mastered many disciplines without showing conceit or intellectual arrogance. What I believe set him apart from many other prominent figures in an era dominated by narcissistic celebrity cults was the unusual combination of personal modesty with his appetite for knowledge. Although he didn’t preach or talk about it much, I believe his attitude to life and leadership were deeply rooted in the Ismail tradition that sees faith as being the quest for knowledge rather than just obedience to divine commands.
When setting up the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, for example, he did not just hire prominent architects. He sent two young researchers around the world to interrogate the idea of Muslim architecture in a cultural domain stretching from the arid realms of the Maghreb to the tropics of Indonesia. Rather than seeing architecture as the mere construction of buildings, he saw it as an engine of development that would serve as a remedy for problems of cultural and social dislocation afflicting not just Muslim countries, but many parts of the developing world.
Consistent with his questioning approach to architecture, he chose the art historian Oleg Grabar to steer the award rather than more obvious theorists such as the late Keith Critchlow or Seyyed Hossein Nasr who regarded the supposedly sacred dimensions of Islamic design as aesthetic expressions of faith. Unlike other architectural prizes, such as the celebrity-stoking Pritzker whose laureates have been hired by the Saudi government to transform the north-west Arabian landscape with spectacular giga-projects, the Award relies on a network of architects, planners and sociologists who nominate projects anonymously using standardized dossiers to minimize bias. The dossiers, assessed by technical experts, not only document actual buildings, but supply the data base for what is now one of the world’s leading online architectural resources. As Aga Khan IV himself explained the value of the Award was not so much to honour ‘final, definitive solutions to be replicated’, but to ‘enrich debate’ and generate excitement. Winners of the Award have included hi-tech buildings like the iconic Kuwait Water Towers or Jean Nouvel’s Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris, but equal if not more attention has always been given to small-scale projects using local materials and enlisting the skills and energies of local people.
A project that received an award in Doha where I was present in 2010 was the Bridge School linking two parts of a village in western China. The village had long been divided by a deep gorge making communications between the two halves difficult and challenging. Constructed from steel with a cladding of local timber, the bridge-cum-building houses a primary school, public library and social centre beneath which the halves are now linked by a pedestrian bridge, while the school section can be adapted for public performances. As the Award citation stated: ‘the result is a project that has successfully invigorated the entire community, encapsulating social sustainability through architectural intervention’.
One could cite numerous commendations of similar calibre made to Award winners in the 45 years since the Award began. But the Bridge School seems especially emblematic, exemplifying as it does the multi-faceted dimension of the approach of Aga Khan IV. The building’s emergence after anonymous evaluation by experts is the opposite of the custom of hiring celebrity architects that prevails in many oil-rich states. The evaluation process was devised by Prince Karim himself, who, after sending his researchers around the world to explore what might constitute Muslim architecture, devoted many hours to examining the dossiers. The process is in obvious contrast to what might be called the current culture of narcissism-flattery rampant in parts of the Muslims world, in which highly-paid consultants tell their wealthy clients what they want to hear and studios rake in millions making models, videos and replicas of these fantasies. Prince Karim was the opposite of many of today’s mega-rich commissioners of consultants. A meticulous note-taker from his student days at Harvard, he was well-known for keeping consultants in every field on their toes, having briefed himself thoroughly about their projects.
The Bridge School’s double function connects directly with two of his leading passions: bridging the social, religious and political boundaries that separate different strands of humanity, and creating a path to human flourishing through the acquisition of knowledge. His passion for bridging the political, social and cultural gaps that afflict human beings was exemplified by the construction in 2002 of a suspension bridge across the Panj River between Tajikistan and Afghanistan that for decades, (since the communist revolution of 1917) had marked the boundary not only between Soviet Tajikistan and Afghanistan, but the cold war division between the Eastern and Western blocs. The gap may now be widening, following the Taliban take-over of Afghanistan in 2021, but the bridge remains a vital symbol of hope.
“The right to hope”, Aga Khan IV declared, “is the most powerful human motivation I know.” Beyond the construction of bridges, hope can be seen as the energy animating what will doubtless come to be seen as his most enduring legacy, the Aga Khan Development Network. Originating in the cluster of institutions established by his grandfather, Sir Sultan Mohamed Shah Aga Khan III to serve the needs of the Ismaili community in India and East Africa, the AKDN was vastly expanded under Aga Khan IV to provide health, educational and cultural services to people of all faiths and backgrounds in the countries where it operates, as well as to stimulate development through socially productive enterprises.
Aga Khan IV explained his Network’s spiritual rationale at the opening of a housing centre I visited in Mumbai. The complex contained 2 and 3-bedroom flats with kitchens and bathrooms, overlooking pleasant communal gardens and a resident’s centre with an extensive library of books, video-tapes and DVDs. Many of the Ismaili families and others who lived there were rural migrants from Gujerat who had previously been living in the baking-hot, fetid shacks of Dharavi, one of the most notorious South Asian shanty-towns, where the air was thick with dust and children played in streets full of running sewage. “There are those”, Aga Khan IV explained, “who enter this world in such poverty that they are deprived of both the means and the motivation to improve their lot. Unless [they] can be touched with the spark which ignites the spirit of individual enterprise and determination, they will only sink back into renewed apathy, degradation and despair. It is for us who are more fortunate to provide that spark.” To me Aga Khan IV’s reference to the ‘spark’ suggested that it is a psychological boost of hope and enablement rather than material help in the form of charity that would help people raise themselves out of poverty. He always disliked being called a ‘philanthropist’ (although the word features in many media obituaries). He saw it as linked to the top-down dispensing of charity rather than creative engagement with people of different faiths and levels of development. While some religious traditions regard dispensing charity along with the renunciation of wealth and comfort as being spiritually desirable, honouring poverty as the antidote to crass materialism of modern cultures, Aga Khan IV saw the grinding squalor in which the poorest found themselves as fundamental obstacles to human — and spiritual — progress. He saw the alleviation of poverty as part of his remit as Imam.
People might ask how, as one of the world’s wealthiest men, he could talk about poverty without having experienced it himself. “I’m very spoilt”, Aga Khan IV once said to me when I complimented him on a Breughel painting in his Paris residence. In an era that demands equality of opportunity (without being able to deliver it) the charity-dispensing activities of the rich and famous may be easily be dismissed as a form of ‘charity-washing’ aimed at diverting public attention from the lack of symmetry between the ultra-wealthy and ordinary folk. The critique may often justified, but it takes little account of the fact that in the real world wealth usually equals power, either directly through the allocation of resources and power of appointment, or indirectly through the access to power that such wealth provides. As Adrienne Clarkson stated shortly after leaving office as Governor-General of Canada:
People would ask me ‘Who is the most remarkable person you have met?’ and I would say ‘The Aga Khan!’ People don’t really understand that, because there is the worldly side, there is the man who appears at Ascot, Chantilly, at the races, and has that life. But there is also this other side, and that is something which I think that Ismailis understand. You don’t have to give up the world in order to have a true spiritual foundation to your life’
As a wealthy individual with royal status, the Aga Khan had access to other world leaders, enabling him cut through political or bureaucratic obstacles in furtherance of his aims and duties. The best-known example was the way he was able to get his friend, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, to assist resettling Ismailis in Canada after the dictator Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972. But there are numerous other examples, including the construction of the bridge across the Panj already mentioned. It could not have been achieved without enlisting the personal support of Tajikistan’s president, Emomali Rahmon.
The Aga Khan’s wealth enabled him to take ‘out-of-the-box’ decisions far beyond the means of other development agencies. For example, some of the network staffers who had been reared in NGOs with anti-tech or ‘small-is-beautiful’ cultures were resistant to his insistence on introducing helicopters (on his own account) in the Himalayan regions of Northern Pakistan, until they realised that being spared the debilitating drudgery of endless jeep drives on perilous mountain tracks enabled their organization — the AKRSP (Aga Khan Rural Support Program) — to maximise its small cadre of highly trained professionals. The Program which, typically, he adapted from a model pioneered in the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by Akhtar Hameed Khan and Shoaib Sultan Khan, is now seen as the world’s most successful system for bringing rural people out of poverty by empowering them through their own initiatives consensually crafted.
Wealth and status did not just enable Aga Khan IV to cut through bureaucratic or political obstacles to his vision for human development. They made it possible for his Network to undertake projects that many people would consider far down the scale of priorities, especially in regions lacking food secirity, not to mention physical safety. The creation of a beautiful public garden from a Cairo rubbish pit — a project that required moving several million tonnes of earth, alongside challenging decades of government inertia — stands as a brilliant example, as did his risky decision to restore the Bagh-e Babur park in Kabul. The beautiful gardens that he engendered in Cairo, Kabul, Khorog (Tajikistan), Bamako (Mali), and other cities I have visited, as well as those surrounding the stunning Jamatkhana buildings I have seen in Lisbon, London and Burnaby-Vancouver, are — like all great Islamic gardens — foretastes of the vision of paradise promised to believers. But even to the sceptic they serve as calming oases of tranquillity and hope in our increasingly unstable and precarious world.
