ISLAMABAD: The government has declared February 8 as a national day of mourning over the sad demise of the spiritual leader of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims Prince Shah Karim Al-Husseini, Aga Khan IV.
According to a notification issued by the Cabinet Division on Thursday, the national flag will fly at half-mast throughout the country on the February 8 as a mark of respect for Prince Karim Aga Khan.
Prince Karim al-Husseini died on Tuesday aged 88, leaving millions of followers in mourning across the world.
He 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.
“Expressing profound grief on behalf of the Government and people of Pakistan on the sad demise of His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, the Prime Minister has declared a Day of National Mourning in Pakistan on Saturday, the 8th of February, 2025, on the occasion of the funeral of His Highness,” the notification reads.
Earlier, on Wednesday, the Gilgit-Baltistan government declared a three-day mourning period across the region and a holiday on Thursday over the demise of Aga Khan IV.
As the news of his demise spread early Wednesday in the region, the Ismaili community and many others were left in deep sorrow and disbelief.
People gathered in large numbers in the community centers, known as jamat khana, to offer prayers and pay their respects to the late Aga Khan IV. The overall mood of the region was somber and markets were deserted.
Who was Aga Khan?
Prince Karim al-Husseini became the imam of the Ismaili Muslims at the age of 20 when his grandfather Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan died in 1957.
This was the first time that that the line of succession was skipped since the seventh century to appoint a “young man” of the “new age”.
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.
He was the son of a British socialite, and went on to have a jetset lifestyle marked by private planes, yachts, skiing in the Winter Olympics. He married twice, first to a British model, with whom he had three children, and later to German singer Gabriele Thyssen, with whom he had a son.
In his youth he had dreamed of becoming an architect, before graduating instead from Harvard University with a degree in Islamic history. Fuelled by his enormous wealth, he launched an apolitical secular development foundation in 1967 credited with raising literacy levels in 18 countries across South and Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He has also pursued a goal of educating the world about the richness of Muslim culture.
“I was born with Islamic ethics in a Muslim family. There is nothing wrong with being well off as long as money has a social and ethical value and is not the object of one’s own greed,” he told AFP in 2008. “One of the principles of Islam is that on his deathbed every person must try to leave behind a better world,” he said.
Prince Karim Aga Khan set up the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) 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.
The Aga Khan has among other things helped finance the reconstruction of Bosnia’s Ottoman-era Mostar bridge, which was destroyed during the Balkan Wars in the 1990s.
He boasts a enviable collection of over 1,000 years of Islamic art, one of the world’s largest and most valuable, that he has put on display in his cultural centres in London, Lisbon, Vancouver and Dubai.
“We don’t do enough to illustrate to the peoples of our world the greatness of Islamic civilisations,” he told AFP in an interview in 2008 in Syria, after funding the restoration of Aleppo’s majestic citadel.
Estimates of his wealth varied from USD800 million to USD13 billion, with his money coming from his family inheritance, his horse breeding business and his personal investments in tourism and real estate.
“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”.