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Universalising Aspirations: Community and Social Service in the Ismaʻili Imagination in Twentieth-Century South Asia and East Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2014

SOUMEN MUKHERJEE
SOUMEN MUKHERJEE*
Affiliation:
Presidency University, Calcutta, [email protected]
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Abstract

Taking the example of the Ismaʻilis in colonial South Asia and East Africa, this article examines some aspects of the complexities involved in the identity formation of communities seeking gradual redefinitions in a deterritorialised global context, reformulating notions of community membership in the process. The Ismaʻili case illustrates an intertwined history of the development of community identity, and a language of social service that became the hallmark of the community under a religious leadership that virtually redefined its position through a vigorous and increasing emphasis on the idiom of social commitment. At one level, this thrust marks a passage from the translocal to the global context, intelligible in terms of the conceptual rubric of global assemblages. At another level, the article also seeks to evaluate the nature of the community's diasporic experience in Africa. It suggests that the ideational framework and praxis of social service — and in more recent times grander developmental endeavours addressing the needs of both Ismaʻilis and non-Ismaʻilis across the world — both reflect, and are mutually constitutive of, more fundamental experiments with identity and repositioning of religious authority that the Ismaʻilis first witnessed in colonial South Asia and East Africa. This article is thus an effort to retrieve some of the continuities and ruptures in the historical process.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 24 , Issue 3: Isna ‘Ashari and Isma‘ili Shi‘ism: from South Asia to the Indian Ocean , July 2014 , pp. 435 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2014 

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References

1 The Ismaʻilis are a minority group among the Shiʻa, diverging from the numerically greater Twelver (or Ithna ʻAshariya) Shiʻa on account of a contending belief in the rightful Imam (in Shi‘i belief, a divinely ordained leader of the Muslim community after the Prophet). The Ismaʻilis believe in Ismaʻil b. Jaʻfar as the successor of Jaʻfar al-Sadiq (the sixth Imam of the Shiʻa), thus deviating from the Twelver Shiʻi faith, since the latter regard Musa al Kazim as the rightful successor. The Ismaʻilis are further subdivided on the question of a rightful successor to Imamate: those supporting al Mustʻali as the successor of al Mustansir Billah came to be regarded as the Mustʻalis (or Bohras in the Indian subcontinent, further split up into different subsections: for example, the Dau’dis, the Sulaimanis, the ʻAliyas etc.); the other group regarding Nizar as the successor, and with belief in a living Imam, came to constitute the Nizaris (the Khojas of South Asia and Africa). Interestingly, however, the nomenclature of “Khoja” and “Ismaʻili” increasingly came to be used interchangeably, especially from the times of their 48th Imam Aga Khan III, Sultan Muhammad Shah, Aga Khan III (1877– 1957), as is documented in his large corpus of works. For a useful overview, see Daftary, Farhad, The Ismāʻīlīs: Their History and Doctrines (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar. For an overview of the Ismaʻilis in India, see Engineer, Asghar Ali, The Muslim Communities of Gujarat: An Exploratory Study of Bohras, Khojas and Memons (Delhi, 1989)Google Scholar. For a more recent contribution on the global Ismaʻili community, see Daftary, Farhad (ed.), A Modern History of the Ismailis: Continuity and Change in a Muslim Community (London, 2011)Google Scholar.

2 Ho, Engseng, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XLVI, 2 (2004), pp. 210–246 Google Scholar, provides a conceptual reorientation in diasporic studies by emphasising the importance of universalist aspirations and principles in the emergence of identity in disparate diasporic contexts. We shall shortly elaborate this in fuller detail. Steinberg, Jonah, Ismaʿili Modern: Globalization and Identity in a Muslim Community (Chapel Hill, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in his effort to understand what he calls “Ismaʻili globalization” and “the community's emergent transnationality”, emphasises “the role of capital and empire in the transformation of human communities into diasporas and other forms”. Ibid., p. 13. In doing so, he further draws upon the multi-sited methodological innovations consolidated in Ho, Engseng, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Bohras, the Khojas and the Memons from western parts of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, it should be mentioned, migrated to East Africa especially during the colonial times, although their commercial links predate the colonial intervention.

3 The Imam of the Khoja Isma‘ilis is called the “Aga Khan” and is also referred to as the “Hazir Imam”, the Imam of the Time.

4 See http://www.akdn.org/about_akdn.asp. This social activism, based on a wider social conscience of Islam seen through the lens of an Ismaʻili worldview, makes a strong argument for a plural understanding of Islam, underlining the “inappropriateness of referring to the Shia–Sunni divide, or to interpretational differences within each branch, in the frame of an orthodoxy-heterodoxy dichotomy, or of applying the term ‘sect’ to any Shia or Sunni community”. See http://www.akdn.org/about_imamat.asp#evolution.

5 See http://www.akdn.org/about.asp. One wonders if this entire endeavour and its framework of ideas are not part of a wider discourse of a particular “secularism”, as suggested by Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003)Google Scholar. The distinctiveness of the idea of secularism is argued to be the fact that it “presupposes new concepts of ‘religion’, ‘ethics’ and politics and new imperatives associated with them”. Ibid., pp. 1–2. It is largely this new understanding of religion and ethics that gives much of the global Ismaʻili philanthropic endeavour its secular outlook — a structural development that is also related to the very formation, in modern times, of what have been referred to as “religious internationals”. See Green, Abigail and Viaene, Vincent, “Introduction: Rethinking religion and globalization” in Religious Internationals in the Modern World, (eds) Green, Abigail and Viaene, Vincent (Basingstoke and New York, 2012), p. 14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The emergence of religious internationals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are thus said to entail the “reforging of religious identities in transatlantic or imperial encounters, and the emergence of new forms of sectarian politics, philanthropy and the press”, at the very heart of which is certain “mobilization and religiously inflected voluntarism” (italics in original). Ibid., pp. 1, 2.

6 See http://www.akdn.org/about_akdn.asp. It is the Imam who “ensures the balance between the shariah or the exoteric aspect of the faith, and its esoteric, spiritual essence” and “according to the needs of time and universe”. See the section on “Principles of Shiism” at http://www.akdn.org/about_imamat.asp#evolution.

7 The privileged position of the Indian-origin Khoja Ismaʻilis within the multi-ethnic global Ismaʻili community, even in contemporary times, is testified to by their continued predominant presence in the Aga Khan's inner council of advisers in his secretariat in Aiglemont, France. See Steinberg, Ismaʿili Modern, p. 57.

8 I use the expression “denomination” merely as shorthand for the worldwide Ismaʻli community, while denuding the expression of its Christian specificities.

9 A besetting problem often encountered by scholars in writing a history of the community's internal life is one of limited accessibility to sources. Indeed, Adatia, A.K. and King, N.Q., “Some East African Firmans of H.H. Aga Khan III”, Journal of Religion in Africa, II, 2 (1969), pp. 179–191 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, suggest that such restricted circulation and lack of direct references often run a potential danger of “some resultant misinterpretation of meaning”. Ibid., p. 181, fn. 2.

10 Central to the emergence of global assemblages, Sassen, Saskia, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, 2006)Google Scholar argues, are the changing notions of community membership and the relationship between citizens and the state even as the “exclusive authority, both objective and subjective, of national states over people, their imaginaries, and their sense of belonging” gradually recedes, facilitating “the entry of non-state actors into international domains once exclusive to national states”. Ibid., p. 299.

11 Steinberg, Ismaʿili Modern, esp. Chapters 1 and 2. His overview of the diasporic experience is perhaps best summarised in his underlining its relevance in the emergence of an Ismaʻili “welfare” discourse and the “process of connecting subjects through service”; Ibid., p. 46. The expression “corporate community” occurs in Morris, H.S., Indians in Uganda(Chicago, 1968), p. 34 Google Scholar.

12 I borrow the expression from Green, Nile, “Africa in Indian ink: Urdu articulations of Indian settlement in East Africa”, Journal of African History, LIII, 2 (2012), pp. 131–150 Google Scholar. Green elaborates the emergence of a discourse of Africa as “an imperial and Islamic settlement zone”. His case study of Indian travelogues provides an important index of this civilisational narrative, “a sophisticated conjunction of imperial and Islamic claims to East Africa in which some Indians felt able to participate as Muslim imperial citizens”. Ibid., p. 133.

13 See Zachariah, Benjamin, Developing India: an Intellectual and Social History (New Delhi, 2012 [2005])Google Scholar, esp. the Preface for an outline of a “developmental imagination”, encapsulating a cluster of cognate ideas on the theme, as opposed to statist developmentalism. Cf. Nandy, Ashis, Bonfire of Creeds: the Essential Ashis Nandy (New Delhi, 2004), pp. 313–318 Google Scholar, for a study of the religio-cultural dimensions and their wider implications for the developmental agenda. According to Nandy, “development does not annihilate cultures; it merely exploits cultures to strengthen itself”, Ibid., p. 319. Based on the present study of the developmental worldview of the Ismaʻilis, I suggest that it is probably more important to see them in terms of mutual constitutiveness (as opposed to exploitation of one by another), and in the process seek to retrieve the immense possibilities that the religio-cultural complex encapsulates. In doing so, I seek to provide a corrective to the tendency of subscribing to a sweeping generalisation that downplays the multifarious complexities of the religio-cultural topos and, in turn, reduces it to a category to be exploited by the grand narrative of developmentalism.

14 For a conceptual manifesto, see Freitag, Ulrike and von Oppen, Achim, “Introduction- ‘translocality’: an approach to connection and transfer in area studies”, in Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective, (eds) Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen (Leiden and Boston, 2010), pp. 1–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In invoking the specificities of regional processes and forces, the “translocal” perspective also redresses some of the overdrawn homogenisations implicit in globalisation theories that tend to conceal the unevenness of different processes and linkages between different territories, as noted by scholars such as Cooper, Frederick in “What is the concept of globalization good for? An African historian's perspective”, African Affairs, C, 399 (2001), pp. 189–213 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 For a recent useful study of this religio-legal and constitutional tradition, see Zulfikar Hirji, “The socio-legal formation of the Nizari Ismailis of East Africa, 1800–1950”, in A Modern History of the Ismailis, (ed.) Daftary, pp. 129–159.

16 It is important to note — as Hirji, “The socio-legal formation of the Nizari Ismailis”, pp. 146–147 shows — the terminological difference, because it is only as late as 1946 that the word “constitution” first appears in the title alongside “rules and regulations”. Furthermore, only in 1962, under Aga Khan IV was the word “constitution” used in the title while the expression “rules and regulations” was dropped.

17 The key issues in the field, though not centrally important in the present discussion, can nevertheless be summarised, with the help of some indicative examples which may help one better appreciate the nature of transoceanic networks and dialogues. Pearson, Michael, “Littoral society: the case for the coast”, The Great Circle, VII, 1 (1985), pp. 1–8 Google Scholar, made a strong case for not seeing the Indian Ocean as a region shaped by a commonality or structure. Chaudhuri, K.N., in Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1990) draws upon Fernand Braudel's approach and sees the Indian Ocean as a space for human transactions, both temporal and spatial. In doing so he sees the Indian Ocean as a matrix within which to engage with comparative studies of civilisations. McPherson, Kenneth, The Indian Ocean: A History of the People and the Sea (Delhi, 1993)Google Scholar sees the Indian Ocean as a world that had its very distinctive and heterogeneous forms of “cultural diffusion and interaction” (p. 3). More recently, the idea of the Indian Ocean as “a space on the move” has come to the forefront, underscoring thereby long-term historical processes. See Reinwald, Brigitte and Deutsch, Jan-Georg (eds), Space on the Move: Transformations of the Indian Ocean Seascape in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Berlin, 2002)Google Scholar.

18 Bose, Sugata, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge MA. and London, 2006), p. 6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 For a good overview of the commercial realm, in a period that overlaps with that under review here, see Ray, Rajat Kanta, “Asian capital in the age of European domination: the rise of the bazaar, 1800–1914”, Modern Asian Studies, XXIX, 3 (1995), pp. 449–554 Google Scholar. Ray argues that the Indian and Chinese commercial and financial networks stretching from Zanzibar to Singapore never really lost their identity as “a distinct international system. . . in the larger dominant world system of the West”, Ibid., p. 554.

20 Recent studies exploring the intersection of socio-religious life and commerce in the Indian Ocean seascape include, for example, Sheriff, Abdul, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (London, 2010)Google Scholar. On the nature of the religious landscape in western India during the nineteenth–twentieth centuries and links with the Indian Ocean networks see, Green, Nile, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Green traces the broad contours of late colonial Bombay's religious landscape and brings out its connections with the western Indian Ocean. With a compelling use of metaphors like “religious economy” that buttress the case for individual choices in “religious consumption”, Green underscores the plural and competitive nature of the religious terrain in late colonial Bombay.

21 For example, Metcalf, Thomas R., Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2007)Google Scholar suggests that far from a colonial periphery in the British Empire, India was the ground from which peoples, ideas, goods and institutions all radiated outwards. See below for elaboration with reference to Aga Khan III's position on this in particular.

22 Ho, “Empire through diasporic eyes”. On the phenomenal resilience of the Hadramis amid all sorts of changes in socio-political dispensations, see Freitag, Ulrike, “Reflections on the longevity of the Hadhrami diaspora in the Indian Ocean”, in The Hadhrami Diaspora in Southeast Asia: Identity Maintenance or Assimilation?, (eds) Abushouk, Ahmed Ibrahim and Ibrahim, Hassan Ahmed (Leiden and Boston, 2009), pp. 17–32 Google Scholar.

23 Subramanian, Lakshmi, “Commerce, circulation and consumption: Indian Ocean communities in historical perspective”, in Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives, (eds) Moorthy, Shanti and Jamal, Ashraf (New York and London, 2010), pp. 136–157 Google Scholar.

24 Amiji, Hatim M., “Some notes on religious dissent in nineteenth century Africa”, African Historical Studies, IV, 3 (1971), pp. 603–616 CrossRefGoogle Scholar attributes the “paucity of females of the Khoja caste” as the major force behind marriage with local women. Ibid., p. 606. A range of socio-economic push and pull factors resulted in a spurt in East Africa's Khoja population between the 1850s and 1870s.

25 Simpson, Edward and Kresse, Kai (eds), Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (London, 2007), pp. 18–19 Google Scholar. And yet a shared belief in specific denominational traits brings them all under a common rubric of religious identity.

26 For Aga Khan III's views on prospects of Indian colonisation in East Africa, see The Khan, Aga, India in Transition: A Study in Political Evolution (London, 1918), Chapter XIII, esp. 127Google Scholar ff. Also see Brennan, James R., “Politics and business in the Indian newspapers of colonial Tanganyika”, Africa, LXXXI, 1 (2011), pp. 42–67 Google Scholar, esp. pp. 46–47; cf. more generally, Green, “Africa in Indian ink”.

27 See Robinson, Francis, “Religious change and the self in Muslim South Asia since 1800”, in his Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 105–121 Google Scholar. Also, Robinson, Francis, “Other-worldly and this-worldly Islam and Islamic revival: a memorial lecture for Wilfred Cantwell Smith”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, XIV, 1 (2004), pp. 47–58 Google Scholar.

28 Khan (III), Prince Aga and Ali, Zaki, Glimpses of Islam (Lahore, 1954? [1944]), pp. 70–71 Google Scholar.

29 This formed part of his reply to the address presented by the Tanganyika Muslim Association, Dar-es-Salaam, 22 July 1945. See Aziz, K.K. (ed.), Aga Khan III, Selected Speeches and Writings of Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, Volume II, 1928–1955 (London and New York, 1997), p. 1206 Google Scholar.

30 See Aga Khan III's reply to the address of welcome from the East African Muslim Conference, Mombasa, 16 June 1945. Ibid., p. 1197.

31 While the need for a “permanent organisation” was underscored in the address mentioned above, the emphasis on pan-Islamic educational institutions occurs in Aga Khan III's reply to the address of welcome from the (Second) East African Muslim Conference, Mombasa, 27 July 1946. See Aziz, Aga Khan III, Volume II, p. 1225.

32 In invoking the expression “India in Africa”, I mean a rather superficial approach to see far deeper encounters as a mere linear engraftment of Indian models on African contexts. I do not intend to trivialise the thoughtful collection of essays, exploring outcomes of cultural encounters and cross-fertilisations across the western Indian Ocean rim, in a volume with a similar title, viz. Hawley, John C. (ed.), India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2008)Google Scholar.

33 However, on the question of marriage with locals, one wonders if Aga Khan III's urgings were not, at least in part, a retrospective validation of what the Khojas in East Africa had been doing for decades. See above, fn 24.

34 Khan, Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga III, The Memoirs of the Aga Khan: World Enough and Time (London, 1954), p. 185 Google Scholar. For an outline of this philosophy and its socio-political implications see, Ibid., pp. 184–191. The fluidity also meant a corresponding flexibility in matters of community governance, ranging from “highly developed and civilised administrative system of councils” in British, French and Portuguese Africa to community leadership based on kinship patterns in parts of Central Asia. Ibid., p. 184.

35 See the summary of two lectures by Aga Khan III given before the Ismaili community in Mombasa, 1–7 April 1926. Aziz, K.K. (ed.), Aga Khan III: Selected Speeches and Writings of Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, Volume I, 1902–1927 (London and New York, 1998), p. 802 Google Scholar.

36 See, for example, Aga Khan III's speech at the dinner of the Aga Khan Students’ Union, June 1951, London. Aziz, Aga Khan III, Volume II, p. 1278.

37 Gregory, Robert G., The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa: The Asian Contribution (New Brunswick and London, 1992), p. 53 Google Scholar. Gregory adds that one of the key aims of the organisation had been to further the conversion of Africans into Islam, though the result was rather disappointing, Ibid., pp. 93–94. However, even its philanthropic efforts were often received sceptically by the Africans. Nimtz, August H., Islam and Politics in East Africa: The Sufi Order in Tanzania (Minneapolis, 1980), p. 91 Google Scholar, shows how the organisation was discredited on the ground that the Indian-origin Ismaʻilis dominated it.

38 van Grondelle, Marc, The Ismailis in the Colonial Era: Modernity, Empire and Islam (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.

39 Faisal Devji, “Preface” to van Grondelle, The Ismailis in the Colonial Era, pp. ix–xvi.

40 Ibid., pp. xi–xii. Even the nomenclature used in the context of the AKDN's organisational arrangement is instructive: for instance, the Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance (AKAM), one of the key AKDN bodies, has its own Board of Directors while His Highness the Aga Khan (IV) is its “Chairman”. See http://www.akdn.org/agencies.asp. Also, the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, established in 1977, has its “Co-Directors” and “Governors”, though at the apex is the Imam Aga Khan IV, once again styled “Chairman”. See http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=104418.

41 Devji, “Preface”, p. xv.

42 “Commencement Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan [IV] at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology” (Cambridge, MA, USA); see http://www.akdn.org/Content/665/Massachusetts-Institute-of-Technology.

43 The element of sensitivity to historical contexts is further borne out by the reinvigorated developmental endeavours in post-Soviet Central Asia, an area which was hardly ever visited in the Soviet era by the Aga Khans. A meticulous study brought out by the Ismailia Association of Pakistan on the tenth anniversary of Aga Khan IV's Imamate, Alidina, Sherali, Ten Eventful Years Of Imamat H.R.H. Prince Karim Aga Khan Imam-e-Zaman (Karachi, 1967)Google Scholar, thus does not mention a single recorded trip by Aga Khan IV to what used to be the USSR. Earlier, in his 1954 memoirs, Aga Khan III noted that no deputations came from Soviet Russia, nor were there communications with the Ismaʻilis in Sinkiang, Kashgar and Yarkand. He believed however that the Ismaʻilis there were not persecuted. See Aga Khan III, The Memoirs, p. 183.

44 Shodhan, Amrita, A Question of Community: Religious Groups and Colonial Law (Calcutta, 2001), pp. 3, 82–116Google Scholar, shows how the disputes were cast in communications about “public issues”. Making a case study of Aga Khan III's career, Purohit, Teena, “Identity politics revisited: Secular and ‘dissonant’ Islam in colonial South Asia”, Modern Asian Studies, XLV, 3 (2011), pp. 709–733 CrossRefGoogle Scholar traces the development of liberal Islam within the rubric of broader debates of religious deviance, liberal ethics and socio-political activism.

45 Though a detailed discussion is beyond the scope of the present article, I should add that E.I Howard, the Defence Counsel of Aga Khan I in the 1866 Case, devoted substantive parts of his defence speech to rehabilitate the humane credentials of the Aga Khan and of the Shiʻi faith and Ismaʻilism in general. See Howard, E. I., The Shia School of Islam and its Branches, Especially that of the Imamee-Ismailies. Being a Speech delivered by Edward Irving Howard, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, in the Bombay High Court in 1866 (Bombay, 1866)Google Scholar.

46 Advocate General v. Muhammad Husen Huseni, (1866), 12 Bombay High Court Reporter (Bom. H.C.R.) 323. See for the judgment, Fyzee, A.A.A., Cases in the Muhammadan Law of India and Pakistan (Oxford, 1965), pp. 504–549 Google Scholar.

47 “List of Political, Quasi-Political & Religious Societies, Sabhas, Anjumans & Labour Unions in the Bombay Presidency & Sind for the year ending June 1920”, Home Department, (Special), File 355 (74) II/1921, Maharashtra State Archives, provides a list of the mehfels (associations). Hardly any of them ever engaged in any political activities, while the chief exception in a limited sense was the Khoja Shia Asna Ashari Volunteer Corps, composed of Ithna Ashariya Khoja youths dedicated to “keep order at political meetings and processions”. Ibid., p. 15.

48 Sheriff, Abdul, “The records of the ‘Wakf Commission’ as a source of social and religious history of Zanzibar”, in Islam in East Africa: New Sources, ed. Amoretti, Biancamaria Scarcia (Rome, 2001), pp. 27–45, p. 41Google Scholar.

49 Malise Ruthven, “The Aga Khan development network and institutions”, in A Modern History of the Ismailis, (ed.) Daftary, pp. 189–220, esp. pp. 191–192.

50 Mukherjee, Soumen, “Being ‘Ismaili’ and ‘Muslim’: Some observations on the politico-religious career of Aga Khan III”, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, XXXIV, 2 (2011), pp. 188–207 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 See the introductory section in the Aga Khan Education Services website: http://www.akdn.org/akes.

52 See Gregory, The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy, p. 114.

53 See Mawani, Zulfikarali, “A brief survey of the development of Ismaili education administration from 1905–1945”, Commemorative Issue, 1977–1978: Sixty Years of Ismaili Education in Kenya (Nairobi, 1977–1978), pp. 19–21 Google Scholar, for a useful overview.

54 In this shift, Tanzania led the way. See Kaiser, Paul J., Culture, Transnationalism and Civil Society: Aga Khan Social Service Institutions in Tanzania (Westport and London, 1996), pp. 79–97 Google Scholar. Kaiser adds that the decline in Ismaʻili population in the country provided a general background for “expanding Ismaili conceptions of community beyond their traditional communal orientation”, Ibid., p. 82. The earlier exclusivism was by no means one of a kind though. For the better part of the colonial period denominational differences among the Indian Muslim population doggedly resisted any effort at standardisation of religious education in key sites in East Africa, such as Zanzibar. See Loimeier, Roman, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar(Leiden and Boston, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 224 ff.

55 The figures are from the 25th anniversary official report. See http://www.akdn.org/Content/210.

56 Thus in an influential work, Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London, 1998), p. 6 Google Scholar, points to “the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability” as crucial factors for the success of any developmental venture.

57 “Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan [IV] at the Global Philanthropy Forum”, 23 April 2009, Washington DC; see http://www.akdn.org/Content/736/Global-Philanthropy-Forum-Washington-DC.

58 Ruthven, “The Aga Khan Development Network and institutions”, p. 190, sees the AKDN as neither a non-government organisation nor faith-based charity but suggests a combination of traits of both. I suppose it is worth remembering that it is always the outsider who is concerned about these labels. Berger, Julia, “Religious nongovernmental organizations: An exploratory analysis”, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, XIV, 1 (2003), pp. 15–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 21 aptly notes that many of such organisations that we might call “religious NGOs” are reluctant to identify themselves with such a label.

59 See http://www.akdn.org/about.asp. This awareness of social service and social activism is instilled systematically through the education of children, underpinning it with a specific set of socio-religious ethics.

60 For a general overview of curriculum from the “pre-school” (4–6 year-olds) to “primary six” (11–12-year-olds) levels, see the Institute's website: http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=104853.

61 For instance, Primary Five, Book Two: People Helping People (London, 1997) introduces Ismaʻili children to a general social awareness, its rich tradition of voluntary service and, above all, the wide-ranging social activism of the AKDN.

62 This consciousness about the pluralism that characterises the Ismaʻili community across the globe is driven home by anecdotes of Ismaʻili children from across the world, from Syria, Tajikistan, Iran to Pakistan and India, and to the USA etc. in Primary Two, Book Three: Murids of Imam az-Zaman (London, 1994). For all this pluralism, the community is bound together in unity under the Imam Aga Khan, and through the relentless efforts of the jamaʻats, striving towards spiritual and material progress of the community.

63 A little-known documentary, The Living Camera: Aga Khan, A 1961 Film of the Young Imam, captures some of these early moments of negotiations. Filmed in Europe and East Africa in 1961, but made available on DVD for the first time only in 2008, the film was made by a team of renowned documentary film-makers, Robert Drew, Gregory Shuker, D.A. Pennebaker and James Lipscomb.

64 For example. Ruthven, “The Aga Khan Development Network and institutions”, pp. 195–196, points out that the successful operation of the Madrasa Early Childhood Programme in East Africa depended upon the support of the Sunni Imams, who had to be convinced that the system would be compatible with Swahili cultural sensibilities. For an overview of the AKDN's partners (national governments, government organisations as well as private institutions), see http://www.akdn.org/partners.asp. A substantial part of the AKDN's funding also comes from various national governments, multilateral institutions and private-sector partners. See http://www.akdn.org/faq.asp.

65 The Constitution of the Khoja Imami Ismailis in Africa (Nairobi, 1962). Cf., for example, the idioms of progress and prosperity for the community in the Constitution of the Councils and Jamats of Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims of Pakistan (Karachi, 1962), published by H.R.H. Prince Aga Khan Ismailia Federal Council for Pakistan.

66 For instance the Aga Khan Social Welfare Board — as though replicating in its own way the various social welfare functions of the AKDN-affiliated bodies — is responsible for an array of social matters affecting the community of the Ismaʻilis in particular.