The Aga Khan, spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims, looks on during a speaking event at Massey Hall in Toronto—Reuters/file
Prince Karim Al-Husseini, Aga Khan IV, Passes away
Prince Karim Al-Husseini, Aga Khan IV, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili community and known for his development work around the world, has died in Lisbon at the age of 88, according to the Aga Khan Development Network on X .
The 49th hereditary imam or spiritual leader of the world’s 15 million Ismailis, his name also became synonymous with success as a racehorse owner, with the thoroughbred Shergar among his most famous.
The international jet setter — who held British, French, Swiss, and Portuguese citizenship — poured millions into helping people in the poorest parts of the world.
“If you travel the developing world, you see poverty is the driver of tragic despair, and there is the possibility that any means out will be taken,” he told the New York Times in a rare interview in 2007.
By assisting the poor through business, he told the newspaper, “We are developing protection against extremism”.
Prince Shah Karim Al-Husseini was born on Dec 13, 1936, in Geneva and spent his early childhood in Nairobi, Kenya.
He later returned to Switzerland, attending the exclusive Le Rosey School before going to the United States to study Islamic history at Harvard.
When his grandfather Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan died in 1957, he became the imam of the Ismailis at the age of 20.
As Aga Khan — derived from Turkish and Persian words to mean commanding chief — he was the fourth holder of the title which was originally granted in the 1830s by the emperor of Persia to Karim’s great-great-grandfather when the latter married the emperor’s daughter.
The role included providing divine guidance for the Ismaili community, whose members live in Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North America.
The Aga Khan set up the Aga Khan Development Network in 1967. The group of international development agencies employs 80,000 people helping to build schools and hospitals and providing electricity for millions of people in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia.
He mixed his development work with private business, owning for example in Uganda a pharmaceutical company, a bank, and a fishnet factory.
“Few persons bridge so many divides — between the spiritual and the material; East and West; Muslim and Christian — as gracefully as he does,” Vanity Fair wrote in its 2013 article .
He was married twice, first in 1969 to former British model Sarah Croker Poole, with whom he had a daughter and two sons. The couple divorced in 1995.
In 1998 he married German-born Gabriele zu Leiningen, with whom he had a son. The couple divorced in 2014. - Reuters
