Aga Khan IV

Prince Karim Al-Husseini was born on December 13, 1936, in Genthod, a commune on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He was the elder son of Prince Aly Khan and his British wife Joan Yarde-Buller, and the grandson of Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III, who had led the Nizari Isma'ili community since 1885 ^[1].

His childhood was divided among several countries. During the Second World War he lived in Nairobi, Kenya, where he received his earliest schooling, before returning to Switzerland to attend Le Rosey, the boarding school near Rolle ^[2]. The family traced its descent from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) through his cousin and son-in-law Ali and his daughter Fatima, a lineage central to the Imamat that Karim would one day inherit ^[3].

In 1954 he entered Harvard University. He initially studied science before switching to Islamic history, a choice that would prove useful sooner than anyone expected. His grandfather's death interrupted his studies, and he returned to Harvard afterward, graduating with honors in 1959 ^[1].

Aga Khan III died in July 1957. His will passed over his sons, including the socially prominent Prince Aly Khan, and named his 20-year-old grandson as successor. The elder Aga Khan explained in the document that the atomic age had so changed the world that the community needed a young leader raised in the midst of the new era ^[3]. Karim thus became the 49th Imam of the Nizari Isma'ilis, a community then estimated in the millions and scattered across South Asia, East Africa, the Middle East, and a growing Western diaspora.

The new Imam faced immediate tests. Ceremonial installations followed in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Kampala, and Karachi, and he began visiting Isma'ili communities on several continents ^[2]. Within his first two decades, political upheaval forced some of the hardest decisions of his tenure. When Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda in 1972, the Aga Khan worked with Western governments, notably Canada under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, to resettle thousands of displaced Isma'ilis ^[4].

Alongside his religious duties he kept one youthful ambition alive. A strong alpine skier, he competed for Iran at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, one of the more unusual entries in any list of Aga Khan IV facts ^[2].

The defining project of his Imamat was institutional. Drawing on schools, clinics, and cooperatives founded by his grandfather, he gradually assembled the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), a group of agencies working in health, education, culture, rural development, and economic investment. By the early twenty-first century the network operated in some 30 countries, employed tens of thousands of people, and served populations of all faiths, not only Isma'ilis ^[5].

Education and health care anchored the effort. In 1983 he chartered the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan's first private university, built around a medical college and teaching hospital ^[5]. In 2000 he joined the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan in founding the University of Central Asia, designed to serve remote mountain societies ^[5]. The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, the network's for-profit arm, backed businesses ranging from Kenya's Nation Media Group, which he had launched in 1959, to banks, hotels, and power companies across Africa and Asia ^[4].

Architecture held a special place in his thinking. In 1977 he established the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, still among the richest prizes in the field, to honor building that serves Muslim societies ^[6]. The related Aga Khan Trust for Culture restored historic quarters and gardens from Cairo's Al-Azhar Park to Humayun's Tomb in Delhi, arguing that beauty and dignity are development goals in their own right ^[6].

Any honest account of Aga Khan IV achievements must reckon with his commercial life, because his followers' tithes and his family's investments funded much of his philanthropy. In the early 1960s he led the development of the Costa Smeralda on the northeastern coast of Sardinia, turning a stretch of undeveloped shoreline into one of the Mediterranean's most exclusive resorts ^[2].

He was also one of the most successful thoroughbred owners and breeders of his era, continuing a family operation begun by his grandfather. His green and red racing silks were carried by champions including Shergar, who won the 1981 Epsom Derby by ten lengths, a record margin for the race. Shergar's kidnapping from an Irish stud farm in 1983, a crime never solved and widely attributed to the IRA, became one of sport's enduring mysteries ^[7]. Later stars bred or raced by his operation included the unbeaten filly Zarkava, winner of the 2008 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe ^[7].

Estimates of his personal fortune ran into the billions of dollars, though the boundary between personal wealth and the endowments of the Imamat was never fully public. He maintained homes and offices in France, and his secretariat at Aiglemont, north of Paris, served for decades as the administrative heart of the Imamat ^[4].

In 1969 he married Sarah Croker Poole, a British former model who took the name Begum Salimah upon her marriage. The couple had three children: Zahra, Rahim, and Hussain. The marriage ended in divorce in 1995 ^[1].

His second marriage, in 1998, was to the German-born Gabriele zu Leiningen, who became known as Begum Inaara. They had one son, Aly Muhammad, before a lengthy divorce concluded in the 2010s ^[2]. Though born a British citizen, he spent most of his life in France and later took Portuguese citizenship after reaching a landmark agreement with Portugal in 2015 that established Lisbon as the global seat of the Isma'ili Imamat, the first such formal seat in the community's modern history ^[8].

Honors accumulated across his life. Queen Elizabeth II granted him the style of His Highness in 1957, Canada made him an honorary citizen in 2010, and governments from Pakistan to France decorated him for services to development and culture ^[4].

The Golden Jubilee of his Imamat in 2007 and 2008 brought celebrations across the Isma'ili world and a fresh round of institution building, including new Ismaili Centres and the Global Centre for Pluralism, founded in partnership with the Government of Canada in Ottawa to study how diverse societies hold together ^[4].

In his final decades he pressed a consistent argument: that poverty, not doctrine, drives much of the instability attributed to the Muslim world, and that civil society institutions matter as much as states. He delivered this case in venues from the Canadian Parliament to Harvard, where he returned in 2015 to give the Jodidi Lecture ^[5].

Aga Khan IV died in Lisbon on February 4, 2025, at the age of 88. He was buried in Aswan, Egypt, near the mausoleum of his grandfather on the banks of the Nile. In accordance with his will, his son Prince Rahim was designated the 50th Imam, taking the title Aga Khan V ^[8].

Few religious leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries left so large a physical footprint. Hospitals in Karachi, Nairobi, and Kabul, schools from the Kyrgyz mountains to coastal Tanzania, restored monuments in Cairo, Delhi, and Zanzibar, and universities on two continents all trace back to institutions he founded or expanded ^[5]. For students of any Aga Khan IV biography, the through line is his insistence that the Imamat's mandate covered the material welfare of people, of every faith, wherever his community lived.

He also reshaped the Isma'ili community itself. Under his leadership a scattered population, repeatedly displaced by decolonization and conflict, consolidated into a well-organized global community with constitutions, councils, and a permanent seat in Lisbon ^[3]. Scholars of Isma'ili history credit him with completing the community's transformation, begun by his grandfather, from a persecuted minority into a confident transnational institution ^[3].

Criticism attached mainly to the opacity surrounding his wealth and to the contrast between his lifestyle and his development mission, a tension he acknowledged and defended as inseparable from the Imamat's dual spiritual and worldly character ^[4]. His son and successor inherited both the institutions and the question that animated them: how a hereditary religious office can keep serving people in a rapidly changing world.