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Earlier this month, I was on my way to make a presentation at Brown University when I received the call from my wife. The Aga Khan IV, whose teachings on the significance of pluralism and the centrality of civil society inspired my career and my nonprofit’s work, had died.
I had been bracing myself for this news. His Highness Prince Karim al-Hussaini Aga Khan IV was 88 and reportedly in poor health. For nearly 68 years, he had served as the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslim community to which I belong — a stunningly long tenure. In accordance with Ismaili tradition, whoever serves as Imam guides both the spiritual and material lives of the community. Yet the Aga Khan IV was only 20, an undergraduate at Harvard, when his grandfather, Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III, appointed him to the role.
Nobody lives forever. In fact, in virtually every farman (a teaching or sermon the Imam delivers verbally to the Ismaili community), the Aga Khan IV emphasized that our physical being is temporary, that only the soul is eternal. The Ismaili Muslim faith, the Imam would say, demands that its followers align our spiritual and physical selves. By doing all the good we can while on earth, we naturally prepare our soul for eternal life.
After the phone call from my wife, I remembered that the Imam had given one of his most fulsome explications of pluralism on the very campus where I was due to speak. In this 2014 talk, the Aga Khan IV described our increasing reliance on digital communication tools as contributing to “growing centrifugal forces.” These, he said, were “forces of fragmentation” that isolate individuals, divide us, and threaten core institutions and democratic societies.
The Imam’s comments predicted many of today’s most alarming challenges, including the loneliness crisis, toxic polarization, tribalism, and a populism feeding autocracy. But we should not reject these technological innovations outright, the Imam said. Rather, we should be wary of how they weaken “the bonds that connect us across our diversities,” which can lead to suspicion of diversity itself.
The best response, the Imam said, is to embrace pluralism, which he described as being “empathetically open to the Other in a diversifying world.” We have to “nurture the bonds of confidence across different peoples and unique individuals. … Difference, in this context, can become an opportunity — not a threat — a blessing rather than a burden.”
The Imam highlighted how pluralism is a shared value across many cultures and faiths. He cited his own tradition, Islam, quoting the Qur’an when he said that humankind is descended from “a single soul” and given by the Divine both human rights and social duties.
Perhaps because he was speaking at a university, the Imam highlighted how Muslim societies had concretized this ethic of pluralism by bringing people of all faiths together in Islam’s great centers of learning, including at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, founded by his predecessor Imams of the Fatimid Caliphate more than a thousand years ago.
Then the Aga Khan IV described pluralism as fundamental to American civilization. One of George Washington’s great achievements, he noted, was to bring a diverse set of colonies together in a single American republic. For all that Washington did in the name of e pluribus unum, the Imam noted, the first president still warned in his farewell address of factions in a democracy that can “kindle the animosity of one part against another,” possibly leading to “a frightful despotism.”
Civil Society as a Bulwark
What might protect us against the dangers of factions and fragmentation? The Imam believed civil society is a bulwark.
He built a model through the Aga Khan Development Network, probably the most widespread and sophisticated collection of Muslim civic institutions in the world. It works in 30 nations in South and Central Asia and across Africa, running more than 1,000 projects and employing nearly 100,000 people in schools, universities, medical centers, food programs, and more.
Pluralism is at the heart of the AKDN. While inspired by its own faith identity, the Ismaili community designed the network to serve all communities. It deliberately nurtures respect for diverse identities, facilitates relationships across difference, and encourages cooperation. This embrace of pluralism is most prominently displayed in the AKDN’s cultural initiatives, which include supporting the indigenous music, art, and architecture of a variety of diverse communities. One of my favorite examples is Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad project, which brought an array of indigenous musical forms together in a single, magnificent sonic collaboration.
For me, faith is inextricably tied to intellectual life and good works. Yes, I pray, but more often I read, and I build. So it is perhaps no surprise that shortly after hearing of the Aga Khan IV’s passing, I re-read that 2014 lecture he gave at Brown. It soothed my mind.
But faith is also about spiritual comfort, having confidence that you have a place in the universe and the sense that some benevolent force is looking out for you and protecting you. Matters of the mind and the body get you only so far. As Aga Khan IV would say: Only the soul is eternal.
So imagine the cosmic connection I felt when, standing on the Brown campus where Aga Khan IV had delivered that important speech, I learned who would succeed him. It turns out that Prince Rahim al-Hussaini, Aga Khan V, had graduated from Brown.
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