The Aga Khan And His Ancestors

His Highness the Aga Khan, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah was a direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad and the spiritual head of millions of Ismailis living across the world. He was a statesman with an international reputation. Providing rich insights into the multifaceted personality of the Aga Khan, this book explores something of what he had done and said as well as how he had achieved a position for himself which had been rivaled by none of his contemporaries. Tracing his descent from Ali who married Fatimah, the only daughter of the Prophet Muhammad by his first wife Khadijah, it describes his ancestry, with a special focus on the lives and achievements of his grandfather and father the Aga Khan Hussain Ali Shah and Aga Khan Aly Shah. Also, it examines the role of Aga khan in India's struggle for independence, as also his contributions toward world peace and educational development.

Aga Khanas Billions and the Assassins: IsmailisaThe Next Islamic Threat? (Sex, Money and Power: An Insideras Account of the Secret World of the Aga Khan) provides an in-depth look into the history and current influences of the Aga Khan. The Aga Khan is the hereditary god-king of a group of Shiite Muslims called the Ismailis. The inherited wealth of the Aga Khan was stolen from the community of followers who have been giving his ancestors their hard-earned money for generations. The book documents the history of the Ismaili Assassins in addition to the royal bloodline, extravagant lifestyle, vast wealth and sexual escapades of the Aga Khan and his family. The book reveals that the Aga Khan has far-reaching connections and money to influence others and maintain power. The author blends together the past and present to highlight the absolute power of the Aga Khan.

An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe. The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan. In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.

I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies Muhammad Hasan al-Husayni, also known as Hasan 'Ali Shah and, more generally, as the Aga Khan (1804-1881), was the 46th Imam of the Nizari Ismailis and the first Ismaili Imam to bear the title of Aga Khan, bestowed on him by the contemporary Qajar monarch of Persia. This book is the first English translation of his memoirs, the 'Ibrat-afza, `A Book of Exhortation, or Example', and includes a new edition of the Persian text and a detailed introduction to the work and its context. The 'Ibrat-afza was composed in the year 1851, following the Ismaili Imam's departure from Persia and his permanent settlement in India. The text recounts the Aga Khan's early life and political career as the governor of the province of Kirman in Persia, and narrates the dramatic events of his conflict with the Qajar establishment followed by his subsequent travels and exploits in Afghanistan and British India. The 'Ibrat-afza provides a rare example of an autobiographical account from an Ismaili Imam and a first-hand perspective on the regional politics of the age. It offers a window into the history of the Ismailis of Persia, India and Central Asia at the dawn of the modern era of their history. Consequently, the book will be of great interest to both researchers and general readers interested in Ismaili history and in the history of the Islamic world in the nineteenth century.