Being ‘Ismaili’ and ‘Muslim’: Some Observations on the Politico-Religious Career of Aga Khan III

Abstract

This paper examines the role of politico-religious leaders of smaller sectarian and sub-sectarian Muslim sects in the broader politics of Muslim community consciousness in colonial South Asia. The case of Aga Khan III, the Imam of the Shiite sub-sect of the Khojas, provides our example. This complex process, whereby the Khoja sub-sect increasingly came to identify with the broader Muslim community in colonial South Asia—albeit preserving certain sub-sectarian particularities—is examined with reference to the paradigmatic model of ‘path dependence’. The balance that Aga Khan III struck between the socio-religious and political worlds—hinging upon his dual role as a spiritual and a political leader—is deconstructed with the qualified employment of the analytical tool of ‘strategic syncretism’. The paper shows how specific socio-religious sub-sectarian traits were effectively retained at the same time as an overarching political consensus forged links between different Muslim sectarian traditions.

Keywords:

• Colonial Bombay
• community consciousness
• political activism
• leadership
• Aga Khan III
• Muslim sect
• Shiite
• Khoja

Notes

¹Notable early exceptions to this line of thought include M.T. Titus, Islam in India and Pakistan: A Religious History of Islam in India and Pakistan (Calcutta: YMCA Press, 1959), pp.87–115, 170–9, which underscores the sectarian differences and the ramifications of Islam's meeting with a non-Islamic environment in South Asia. Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims (Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1973), is an ambitious project to identify the specific ‘Indian’ elements of Islam in the subcontinent. The problems of ‘representation’ and ‘consensus’ are dealt with in Farzana Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). More recently, Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), has looked at the variables of individual, regional, class and cultural differences that went into forging an Islamic identity in South Asia.

²This, as distinct from discussions about ‘identity’, invokes the idea of a two-way process whereby ‘groups, movements, institutions try to locate us … construct us within symbolic boundaries’ and in turn ‘we try to manipulate or respond to it’ so as to ‘exist within that kind of symbolic framework’. See Stuart Hall, ‘Politics of Identity’, in Terence Ranger, Yunas Samad and Ossie Stuart (eds), Culture, Identity and Politics (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), pp.129–35, esp. p.130.

³Ayesha Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia’, in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (eds), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.76–103. A further problem is the expression ‘communalism’, which refers to the apparent ‘illegitimacy’ of religious nationalism. See Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp.8–9. It is because of the delegitimising aspect of the term ‘communalism’ that, taking my cue from Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), I prefer the expression ‘religious nationalism’ here.

⁴In matters of intestate succession they were governed by rules closer to Hindu laws than Sharia until 1937, when the Shariat Act came into effect. There is a plethora of literature on the history and culture of the Ismaili community. Farhad Daftary, The Ismā‘īlīs: Their History and Doctrines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) offers a general history of the community down to modern times. Revisionist works such as Dominique-Sila Khan, Conversions and Shifting Identities: Ramdev Pir and the Ismailis in Rajasthan (New Delhi: Manohar/Centre de Sciences Humaines, 1997) bring out the ‘threshold’/liminal nature of the Nizari Khojas. See also Dominique-Sila Khan and Zawahir Moir, ‘Coexistence and Communalism: The Shrine of Pirana in Gujarat’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol.XXII, Special Issue (1999), pp.133–54; and more recently Dominique-Sila Khan,Crossing the Threshold: Understanding Religious Identities in South Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). The bulk of this literature corrects scholarly works from the early twentieth century that attached much importance to Persian missionary activities (dawa) which had supposedly conditioned the development of the religio-cultural traits of the Nizari Khojas. Representative of such older scholarship is Wladimir Ivanow, ‘The Sect of Imam Shah in Gujrat’, in Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JBBRAS), Vol.XII (1936), pp.19–70. For the projection of the Khoja faith as an extension of Persian missionary activities, see Azim Nanji, The Nizārī Ismā‘īlī Tradition in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (Delmar: Caravan Books, 1978); and Daftary, The Ismā‘īlīs.

⁵See fn.13.

⁶‘Aga Khan’ is the title of the Imams of the Nizari Khojas. Hasan Ali Shah (1804–1881), the 46th Imam of the Nizari Khojas was Aga Khan I; he was succeeded by Aga Ali Shah, Aga Khan II (1830–1885), and Sultan Muhammad Shah, Aga Khan III (1877–1957) who succeeded to the Imamate in 1885 at age seven.

⁷The Shiites are divided into different sections of whom the Twelver Shiites, with their belief in twelve Imams, constitute the majority. The Ismailis believe Ismail ibn Jafar was the successor to Jafar al Sadiq, thus deviating from the Twelver Shiites who regard Musa al Kazim as the rightful successor. The Ismailis are further sub-divided on the question of the rightful successor to the Imamate: those supporting al Mustali as the successor to al Mustansir Billah came to be regarded as the Mustalis (or Bohras in the subcontinent, further split into different sub-sections); the other group, who regard Nizar as the successor, and who believe in a living Imam, came to constitute the Nizaris (the Khojas of South Asia).

⁸See Teena Purohit, ‘Identity Politics Revisited: Secular and “Dissonant” Islam in Colonial South Asia’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.45, no.3 (2011), pp.709–33 for an insightful analysis of the career of Aga Khan III with reference to the simultaneous development of what she calls ‘the political project of secular Islam’, characterising the Aga Khan's political activities, and the activation of religious motifs of messianic Islam as expressed through the ginan (Ismaili devotional literature from the subcontinent) tradition.

⁹Much of the debate about elite manipulation of South Asia's Hindus and Muslims is encapsulated in the Brass–Robinson debate. This gravitates around the question of elite agency, often allegedly going to the extent of circumventing contextuality, as upheld by Brass. See Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp.119–81; Paul Brass, ‘Elite Groups, Symbol Manipulation and Ethnic Identity Among the Muslims of South Asia’, in David Taylor and Malcolm Yapp (eds), Political Identity in South Asia (London and Dublin: Curzon Press, 1979), pp.35–77; and Paul Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1991), pp.69–118. Opposed to this is Francis Robinson, ‘Islam and Muslim Separatism’, in David Taylor and Malcolm Yapp (eds), Political Identity in South Asia (London and Dublin: Curzon Press, 1979), pp.78–112; and Francis Robinson, ‘Nation Formation: The Brass Thesis and Muslim Separatism’, in Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.156–76, where he emphasises the historical significance of socio-religious and cultural movements and the general politico-historical context. However Robinson is not very comfortable with the label ‘primordialist’ either, see Islam and Muslim History, p.13.

¹⁰While the ‘instrumentalist’ version has been ascribed most consistently to Paul Brass, the model developed in his Language, Religion and Politics in North India did not ignore the role of ‘pre-existing cultural values or intergroup attitudes’ in conditioning the ability of elites to manipulate symbols. See Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism, pp.76–7. For a theoretical outline, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, in Political Theory, Vol.2, no.3 (1974), pp.289–301, which underlines the dynamic relationship between ‘professed principles and actual practices of political life’.

¹¹Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Hindu Nationalism: Strategic Syncretism in Ideology Building’, in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Vol.28, nos.12–13 (Mar. 1993), pp.517–24. See also Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp.193–54.

¹²Jaffrelot, ‘Hindu Nationalism’, p.517.

¹³For accounts of this animosity see the late-Mughal Persian text by Ali Muhammad Khan, Mirat I Ahmadi, in Syed Nawab Ali and C.N. Seddon, Mirat I Ahmadi: Supplement (Baroda: Gaikwad's Oriental Series, 1928), pp.109–10. E.I. Howard, defence counsel for the Aga Khan in the 1866 Great Khoja Case, pointed to the danger of persecution and the resultant outward conformity of the Khojas to Sunni custom (takyyia). See E.I. Howard, 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: Oriental Press, 1866), pp.17–28, 61.

¹⁴James Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology’, in History and Society, Vol.29, no.4 (2000), pp.510–11, summarises path-dependent analysis by pointing to its three characteristic features: first, the causal processes studied are particularly sensitive to ‘events that take place in the early stages of an overall historical sequence’; secondly, these early events are essentially contingent; and thirdly, these contingent events are followed by ‘relatively deterministic causal patterns’. Furthermore, once a historical sequence gathers its own ‘inertia’, it tends to influence the policy of individual actors/agents; that is to say, individual decisions/policies are conditioned by broader institutionalist frameworks.

¹⁵A jamat is an institution of adult male Khojas from a locality which has its own bureaucratic structure and officials such as an accountant (kamaria) and treasurer (mukhi), usually hailing from the wealthiest sections of the community.

¹⁶See Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India: Politics and Communities in Bombay City, 1840–1885 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp.113–21. See also J.C. Masselos, ‘The Khojas of Bombay: The Defining of Formal Membership Criteria During the Nineteenth Century’, in Ahmad (ed.), Caste and Social Stratification, pp.8–10; Amrita Sodhan, A Question of Community: Religious Groups and Colonial Law (Calcutta: Samya, 2001), pp.45–116; and Teena Purohit, ‘Formation and Genealogies of Ismaili Sectarianism in Nineteenth Century India’, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 2007, pp.27–57 [http://www.proquest.com.ubproxy.ub.uni-heidelberg.de, accessed 28 Sept. 2009].

¹⁷See Sodhan, A Question of Community, pp.3, 82–116. However, to what extent and how this changing rhetoric conditioned Aga Khan III's political and socio-religious ventures needs to be further explored. The reformist articles and letters were published in the Bombay Times and Standard and The Times of India mostly between May, 1861 and December, 1862. These articles and letters, with copious reference to notes from the Deccan Herald and The Poonah Observer, were eventually compiled in a collection entitled A Voice from India: Being an Appeal to the British Legislature, by Khojahs of Bombay, against the Usurped and Oppressive Domination of Hussain Hussanee, commonly called and known as Aga Khan, by a Native of Bombay, 1864. This collection was later included in Karim Goolamali, An Appeal to Mr. Ali Solomon Khan, Son of H.H. the Aga Khan (Karachi: Khoja Reformers' Society, 1932). While there might well have been more than just an ‘economic’ angle to attitudes to religion and/or dissent, the paucity of sources clearly articulating the dissenting position of the 1820s (unlike the 1860s) leaves studies of the 1820s' dissent somewhat incomplete at the present. If anything, E.I. Howard, The Shia School of Islam and its Branches, p.60, points out that it was not until 1851 that the plaintiffs actually came to affirm their Sunni identity.

¹⁸For the Bohras and the Khojas, matters of intestate succession were governed by rules similar to Hindu laws until 1937. See Hirbae v. Sonbae, or the Khojas and Memons' Case (1847), in ‘Cases Illustrative of Oriental Life and the Application of English Law to India, Decided in H.M. Supreme Court at Bombay by Sir Erskine Perry’, p.110, reprinted in The Indian Decision, (Old Series), Vol. IV (Trichinopoly and Madras, 1912), p.707.

¹⁹Michael R. Anderson, ‘Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India’, in David Arnold and Peter Robb (eds), Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS Reader (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1993), pp.165–85.

²⁰The standard strategy was to point to ambiguity in the composition of the jamats which allegedly made them tools of the Aga Khan. See ‘Annexure to Bill to amend and define the law of Testamentary and Intestate Succession to Khojás', in India Office Records (IOR), Public & Judicial Department Records, ‘The Khoja Succession Bill’, 1884, L/PJ/6/131, File 1428. See also C. Gonne to His Highness the Aga Khan, 18 December 1878; and ‘Bill for Regulating Succession and Inheritance among (Khojas) of Bombay’, Home Department, Judicial Branch, March 1880, Proceedings 123–134 (A), National Archives of India (NAI).

²¹ Haji Bibi v. H.H. Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, the Aga Khan (1909), 11 Bombay Law Reports (Bom. L.R.), p.409.

²²Indeed, from the 1870s onwards, the landscape of Ismaili Khoja socio-religious activism was gradually changing. This was reflected in the foundation of a series of Ithna Ashariya (Twelver) Khoja associations (mehfels) with a view to promoting the socio-religious interests of that community. One of the earliest associations engaged in the ostensibly innocuous activity of imparting ‘Arabic and religious education to the Khoja children of the Asna [Ithna] Ashari community and to hold religious meetings’ was the Mahfil-i-Asna Ashari, established in 1878 and maintained by the Ithna Ashariya Khoja merchant Ibrahim Hasham at his own expense. Almost all these associations—the Mahfil-i-Panjtan established in 1887, the Khoja Mahfil-i-Huasin (sic) established in 1888, and the Khoja Shia Asna Ashari Volunteer Corps established in 1919 (the last organisation was probably reflective of the general spirit of self-help groups of the time)—were founded with the active support of Ithna Ashariya landed proprietors and merchants with limited financial means, and with a limited scope of activities. Such activities primarily meant propagating Ithna Ashariya Khoja religious beliefs; in fact, for the ever-sceptical colonial establishment they were by and large religious associations ‘of no importance’. Indeed, hardly any of them ever engaged in any political activities; the chief exception in a limited sense was the Khoja Shia Asna Ashari Volunteer Corps, composed of Ithna Ashariya Khoja youths charged to ‘keep order at political meetings and processions’. See ‘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, pp. 15–7, Maharashtra State Archives (MSA).

²³With Justice Maxwell Melvill as president, the Commission was encharged to ascertain the views of the Bombay Khojas with regard to the viability of placing them under the umbrella of the Hindu Wills Act (XXI of 1870). It originally had four members, representing the different strands within the Khoja community. Later two more members were admitted at the suggestion of the Aga Khan. Four of these members represented the Shiite division of the Khojas, while one came from the Sunni branch. See ‘Bill for Regulating Succession and Inheritance among (Khojas) of Bombay’. See also ‘The Khoja Succession Bill’, 1884.

²⁴Petition of Abdullah Haji Alarukhia and twelve other Sunni Khojas, IOR, Public & Judicial Department Records, ‘Papers Relating to the Khoja Succession Bill’, 1886, L/PJ/6/169, File 235.

²⁵Dietrich Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere: Religious Groups in India, 1900–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.2.

²⁶ Ibid., pp.3–6.

²⁷It can be further suggested that even ‘Islamist enterprises’, in their embryonic stage, might be something very different. Thus the trajectory of Abul Ala Maududi's essentially Islamist enterprise shows that the ‘Islamist’ dimension was preceded by a more general engagement with the political world, not necessarily religiously underpinned. As has been noted, his involvement in the Khilafat Movement was ‘premised not on religion, but on history’. See Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.20.

²⁸See IOR, Political & Secret Department Records, ‘Memorandum by H.H. the Aga Khan: Suggestion that the Policy of Great Britain should be to Protect Islam in Central Asia’, 1918/L/PS/11/141, Subject P 5169/ 1918.

²⁹H.H. The Aga Khan, India in Transition: A Study in Political Evolution (Bombay and Calcutta: Bennett, Coleman and Co. Ltd., The Times of India Offices, 1918), pp.vii–x.

³⁰ Ibid., pp.156–8. Michel Boivin, ‘The Reform of Islam in Ismaili Shīism from 1885 to 1957’, in F. Delvoye (ed.), Confluence of Cultures: French Contributions to Indo-Persian Studies (Delhi: Manohar, 1994), pp.120–39, points to a certain harmonisation of Iranian and Indian traditions under Aga Khan III leading to the formation of a third category, or what Boivin calls ‘neo-Ismailism’, marked by a redefinition of the essential principles of Islam, with emphasis on spiritual pan-Islamism with strong ethical underpinnings.

³¹The Aga Khan, India in Transition, pp.1–14.

³²The importance of this event has been emphasised by many commentators, politicians and historians. Aga Khan III, the leader of the deputation, himself noted it as ‘the starting point of the recognition of the principle that the important Muslim minority in this country should have fair and legitimate share in the administration of the country’. Inaugural Address of the Aga Khan, Third Session of the All India Muslim League, Delhi, 29–30 January, 1910; see Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan: All India Muslim League Documents, 1906–1947: Volume I, 1906–1924 (Karachi and Dacca: National Publishing House Limited, 1969), p.94. David Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, rev. ed., 1996), p.337, however, argues that the deputation was essentially an act of the ‘Aligarh elders’ and the Aga Khan was nothing more than a titular leader. The crux, nevertheless, lay in the elders' choice of the Aga Khan as the leader, which at once promoted him to the much-aspired-to position of leadership of South Asia's Muslims (though obviously not uncontested) vis-à-vis the Congress claims of representing Muslims.

³³This came in the form a letter published in the Gujarati (Bombay, 7 October 1906). See Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada (ed.), The Collected Works of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Vol. I, 1906–1921 (Karachi: East and West Publishing Company, 1984), p.1.

³⁴This was conditioned, at least partly, by his not-so-smooth relations with Nawab Salimullah. Matiur Rahman, From Consultation to Confrontation: A Study of the Muslim League in British Indian Politics, 1906–1912 (London: Luzac & Company Ltd., 1970), pp.28–30, suggests a much nuanced power-struggle between Aga Khan III and Nawab Salimullah. The All India Muslim League was nevertheless established, thanks to the concatenation of different forces: that of Hindu nationalism, the ostensible failure of the Simla Deputation, and above all the role of Syed Ameer Ali, Salimullah, and Mohsin-ul-Mulk among others. Ibid., pp.32–4. And it was only in 1909 that the All India Muslim League and the Muslim Educational Conference were separated. See Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation, p.339.

³⁵A Daudi Bohra merchant baron and philanthropist from Bombay, Adamjee Peerbhoy was one of the pioneers championing a common Bohra cause from the 1870s, and gradually taking up broader Muslim issues, becoming the president of the first session of the All India Muslim League in 1907. See Soumen Mukherjee, ‘Community Consciousness, Development, Leadership: The Experience of Two Muslim groups in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Asia’, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 2010, Chapter 4.

³⁶Kassumbhai Nathubhai, Muhammad Dama and several other rich Khojas of Bombay established a school for Khoja children as early as the 1830s. Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India, p.115.

³⁷The (Bombay) Anjuman-i-Islam, formed to cater to Muslim interests and appealing to broader ideological concerns, was one of several Anjumans operating around the time; others were the Anjuman Himayat-i-Islam, Lahore, and the Anjuman-i-Islamia, Amritsar. See Abdul Rashid Khan, The All India Muslim Educational Conference: Its Contribution to the Cultural Development of the Indian Muslims, 1866–1947 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.60.

³⁸Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India, pp.232–6.

³⁹This was in sharp contrast to earlier trends when the role of Gujarati as a language that bound the various ‘Gujarati-speaking trading classes’ together despite internal conflicts and differences, chiefly religious, used to be invoked, most prominently in moments of crisis. Thus in the early 1830s, during protests against a municipal decision to slaughter stray dogs which would hurt Parsi religious sentiments, the Parsis were joined by Hindus, Jains, and Muslims (particularly Ismaili Muslims), showing the power of the Gujarati-speaking coterie. Jesse S. Palsetia, ‘Mad Dogs and Parsis: The Bombay Dog Riots of 1832’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, Vol.11, no.1 (2001), pp.18–19.

⁴⁰Gail Minault and David Lelyveld, ‘The Campaign for a Muslim University, 1898–1920’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.8, no.2 (1974), pp.145–89.

⁴¹ Ibid., pp.146–8.

⁴²Part of the urgency was directly connected to genuine concerns to uplift the social conditions of a qaum seriously discredited by critiques in government circles of alleged backwardness. This is largely attributed to W.W. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., [1871], 2004), though Hunter himself was quite categorical about the limited nature of his sources which he derived from Bengal. Ibid., p.149. Curiously, however, this was subsequently applied in the pan-Indian context to explain ‘Muslim separatism’.

⁴³For example in 1906 Peerbhoy donated Rs110,000 for the establishment of a science college at Aligarh. See Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan, Vol. I, p.16.

⁴⁴Justin Jones, ‘The Local Experience of Reformist Islam in a “Muslim” Town in Colonial India: The Case of Amroha’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.43, no.4 (2009), pp.889–96.

⁴⁵Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III, The Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough and Time (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1954), p.185.

⁴⁶For discussions about the structural organisation and functioning of jamats, see Sodhan, A Question of Community, pp.73–4. H.S. Morris, ‘The Divine Kingship of the Aga Khan: A Study of Theocracy in East Africa’, in Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vol.14, no.4 (1958), pp.454–72 examines why such a council system developed in India and East Africa as opposed to anywhere else. For accounts on how the pirs worked in the high mountains and valleys around Chitral, Afghanistan and Central Asia, see details of the Forsyth mission (late 1860s) in A.S. Picklay, History of the Ismailis (Bombay: Published by the author, 1940), pp.64–8; and Aga Khan III, The Memoirs of Aga Khan, pp.184–6.

⁴⁷ The Khoja Shia Imami Ismaili Council, Poona: Rules and Regulations (Poona: The Khoja Shia Imami Ismaili Council, 1913), pp.39–41, 43.

⁴⁸See Aga Khan III, ‘Presidential Address to the All India Muslim Educational Conference’, Delhi, 1902, in K.K. Aziz (ed.), Aga Khan III: Selected Speeches and Writings of Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, Volume I, 1902–1927 (London and New York: Kegan Paul International), p.210.

⁴⁹See Francis Robinson, ‘Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia since 1800’, in Islam and Muslim History, pp.104–21; and Francis Robinson, ‘Other-Worldly and This-Worldly Islam and Islamic Revival: A Memorial Lecture for Wilfred Cantwell Smith’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, Vol.14, no.1 (2004), pp.47–58.

⁵⁰This ‘Reply’ came out in The Times of India (Bombay, 27 Jan. 1910). See Aziz (ed.), Aga Khan III, Volume I, pp.325–7.

⁵¹See his interview with The Times (14 Feb. 1909), cited in Aziz (ed.), Aga Khan III, Volume I, pp.288–93.

⁵²See, for example, Aga Khan III, The Memoirs of Aga Khan, p.187.

⁵³See The Times (2 Oct. 1914), p.9.

⁵⁴In 1916, he suggested in a confidential note the need to ‘knock out’ Turkey, citing the unholy hobnobbing of the ruling Turkish elite with the Germans that allegedly hurt Muslim sentiment. Drawing a line between this ‘modern’ Turkish ruling group and general Muslim interests, he advocated overthrowing the Turkish government and opting for a separate peace with Turkey. IOR, Political & Secret Department Records, ‘The War: Importance of “Knocking Out” Turkey: Views of the Aga Khan’, 1916, L/PS/11/111, Register No. P 4306/1916.

⁵⁵The classic study of the Khilafat Movement is Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

⁵⁶For example, scepticism about the Aga Khan's claims to Muslim leadership is testified to by a confidential note which warns that the Aga Khan, being the ‘heretic of heretics’ according to the majority of Muslims, should be checked in his interactions with both the Sultan of Zanzibar and Prince Faisal of the Hijaz, one of the key provinces of Ottoman Turkey which rebelled against Turkish suzerainty during the World War I at the instigation of the British. See J.A.W. to Seton, 24 January 1919, IOR, Political and Secret Department Records, ‘Confidential Note on the Subject of Aga Khan’, 1919, L/PS/11/147 Subject P.541. Later correspondence on the subject of the recommendation of the Aga Khan for the Nobel Peace Prize sheds further light on influential government views, bordering on scorn at times. The Aga Khan figures as a political opportunist, dangerously cut off from his own Muslim fraternity, seriously ridiculed by different groups. IOR, Political and Secret Department Records, ‘Papers Relating to the Recommendation of the Aga Khan for the Nobel Peace Prize, 1924’, 1924, L/PS/10/588, File 748/1916, Pt. 1-date: 1915–1925. Thanks to the Aga Khan's Persian background and warm relations with the Iranian ruling elites in general, Prince Samad Khan of Iran, a member of the International Court of Arbitration at The Hague, submitted a statement of nomination in favour of the Aga Khan—supported by a resolution of the Upper Chamber of the Indian Legislature—before the Nobel Committee in 1924 for his contributions to world peace. The ‘motivation’ emphasised his contributions as an ‘Asiatic’ to the new process of transition that was supposedly redefining relations between the West and the Asiatic world that were reflected in the post-war peace efforts, and above all in ‘loyalty to the Empire’. See ‘Memorandum on the Services of H.H. the Aga Khan to the Cause of International Peace’, in ‘Papers related to the Nomination of Aga Khan III, Year 1924, No. 2–1’, The Norwegian Nobel Institute (NNI). The Government of India was discreet enough to distance itself from the nomination, stressing that it came from members of a Legislative Chamber, ‘each of them individually qualified to propose a candidate … not a matter in which the Government of India could take part’. Letter of J.P. Thompson, Sec. to Gov't. of India in Foreign and Political Dept. to Sec. of the Nobel Committee (11 April 1924), in ‘Papers related to the Nomination of Aga Khan III, Year 1924, No. 2–1’, NNI.

⁵⁷A disquieting moment came in World War II, apparently vindicating much of the earlier British scepticism. In 1940 the Nazi functionary from Sudetenland, Prince Max Hohenlohe, noted that the Aga Khan had offered his organisational services—drawing upon his followers and his several maharaja friends—in the event that Hitler's Third Reich decided to take over India. See ‘Prinz Hohenlohe an Vortragenden Legationsrat Hewel’ (25 July 1940), in Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik, 1918–1945: Aus dem Archiv des Deutschen Auswärtigen Amts, Serie D: 1937–1945, Band X (Frankfurt/Main: P. Keppler Verlag KG, 1963), p.242 (Document No. 228). Whether this was just a ploy to safeguard South Asia's Muslim interests in general and that of his Ismaili followers in particular in the event of a German takeover, or if he was indeed entrenched in Nazi counsel, calls for further exploration, though that takes us beyond the scope of the present essay.

⁵⁸Thus The Washington Post (4 Nov. 1914), p.8 [http://www.proquest.com.ubproxy.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/, accessed 1 Oct. 2009] described him as the ‘spiritual head of the Mohammedans in India, East Africa, and Central Asia’, while the columnist F. Cunliffe-Owen, in a serious misunderstanding of Islamic history and culture, actually went on to declare how the ‘whole Moslem world’ regarded the Aga Khan as the direct descendant of the Prophet and, even more preposterously, the possibility of the Aga Khan becoming ‘Caliph’. See The New York Times (8 July 1923), p.XX5 [http://www.proquest.com.ubproxy.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/, accessed 1 Oct. 2009]. Later journalistic works, for example Naoroji M. Dumasia, The Aga Khan and His Ancestors (Bombay: Times of India Press, 1939) and Harry J. Greenwall, His Highness the Aga Khan: Imam of the Ismailis (London: Gresset Pr., 1952) also eulogise the Aga Khan's person and position to an astonishing degree.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soumen Mukherjee

Versions of this paper were presented at the universities of Edinburgh and Heidelberg. I wish to thank the audiences and especially Faisal Devji, Michel Boivin, Gita Dharampal-Frick, Margret Frenz, Suranjana Ganguly, Roger Jeffery, Anne Mossner, Francis Robinson, Dietmar Rothermund, Franziska Roy and the anonymous referees of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies for their insightful comments.