(RNS) — On Tuesday (Feb. 4), Shah Karim al-Hussaini, Aga Khan IV, passed away in Lisbon, at age 88. For most Americans, this name has little meaning. People with a particular historical awareness may remember his grandfather, Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III, as one of the founders of the League of Nations and international statesman. But even those who know the lineage of the Aga Khans, a title that goes back to the British Raj in India, don’t understand who Shah Karim was.
Both men were Imams, or spiritual leaders, of a Muslim community known as the Ismailis. This community is a Shi’ah community that believes the Prophet Muhammad named his cousin and son-in-law Ali as the first Imam. This figure of the Imam is designated in the Quran, the revealed word of God, according to Muslims, and is guaranteed by God to guide the community of believers. The Aga Khans are descended from Prophet Muhammad through Imam Ali and his wife Fatima.
Shah Karim, the 49th Imam in the lineage, took his title as Aga Khan in 1954, when he was 20, after the death of his grandfather.
The Aga Khan IV, who headed the Aga Khan Development Network, was often referred to as a philanthropist, a label that he himself called deeply inaccurate. According to broader Shi’ah belief, three interrelated elements are believed to elevate one another: faith, knowledge, and action. To increase in any one area, you must increase in the other areas as well, and together each amplifies the other. Most importantly, faith and knowledge without action is selfish and a denial of God’s blessings.
In May 2006, in accepting the Tolerance Award from the Evangelical Academy of Tutzing, in Germany, the Aga Khan said, “I am fascinated and somewhat frustrated when representatives of the Western world … try to describe the work of our Aga Khan Development Network … they often describe it either as philanthropy or entrepreneurship.” He attributed the misconception to a false dichotomy made between secular and religious and explained that his work is in fact an expression of this relationship among faith, knowledge and action.
In the speech, he emphasized that he aimed “to improve the quality of worldly life for the concerned communities,” offering two exemplar inspirations. The first is the first verse of the Quran’s fourth chapter, which says “O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord, Who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate and from the twain hath spread abroad a multitude of men and women.” The verse, the Aga Khan said, says that we are all connected, coming from the same origin, and that we are also diverse, and this is a sign of God’s blessings.
The second piece of inspiration he gave was a teaching of Imam Ali, which speaks of ideal virtues, including faith, knowledge and action and the ability to have humility and seek consultation.
The Aga Khan was a historical figure, a man of the world who skied in the Olympics on the Iranian team, received numerous honorary degrees and worked as an international peacemaker. But it is important to understand what drove him to achieve these things. The Tutzing speech is a window into that impetus: He didn’t act out of a wish for worldly acclaim or the disbursement of worldly wealth. Rather, his course in life was an expression of faith and knowledge, an essential part of what it means to be a believer, to be human.
A person of integrity, the Aga Khan did everything as part of a comprehensive whole. There was not a part that was separate from another part. For his community, he was the living exemplar of what it meant to embody the ethics of religion in its most complete form. His passing is a loss to the community and a reminder that God has promised them continual guidance, in the line of Imams that continues with his son, Prince Rahim al-Hussaini, Aga Khan V.
(Hussein Rashid, Ph.D., is an independent scholar based in New York and an Ismaili Muslim. The views in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
