Friday, October 3, 2008

Opening Remarks by Salim Bhatia at the Stone Laying Ceremony of The Aga Khan Academy, Hyderabad

22 September 2006

It is a great privilege and pleasure to welcome such a distinguished group of individuals to this Foundation Stone-Laying Ceremony in Hyderabad. Thank you for being with us today. Your presence here signifies the importance you place on education and the role you see the Aga Khan Academies playing in education in Andhra Pradesh and in India. The Government of Andhra Pradesh has already expressed its enthusiasm for this project by the gift of this exceptional site. Your Excellency we greatly appreciate your and the government of Andhra Pradeshs generous support.

Thank you.


I have the honour of having been entrusted with the extraordinary vision of His Highness for the Academies as Director of the Aga Khan Academies. Under the guidance of His Highness and with the generous support of many expert advisors, both voluntary and remunerated, across the globe we are doing the careful, creative work of building the Aga Khan Academies network, of which the Hyderabad Academy is an integral part. At this time, we envisage a network of 18 campuses across South and Central Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East, to be established over the course of the next decade or so. This is not just a system of quality schools operated under the one banner but rather its a global learning community in which students and teachers at each Academy contribute and participate.



The decision His Highness took to establish the network of Aga Khan Academies is consistent with the Aga Khan Development Networks contemporary mandate to help relieve society of ignorance, disease and deprivation without regard to the faiths or national origins of the people whom they serve. And so, the Aga Khan Academy in Hyderabad too will serve Indian students from all backgrounds.

Over the past century, the Ismaili Imamat has built over 300 schools in the countries where we plan to build Academies. The Aga Khan Education Service currently operates 42 educational institutions in India, educating over 12,000 students and employing over 450 teachers. In addition, in conjunction with the Aga Khan Foundation, it impacts, through school improvement programs, an additional 365 institutions, 58,000 students and over 1300 teachers. The AKDN institutions in India play a critically important role of providing a solid education to many who would otherwise not have access to any education, particularly girls and boys in rural parts of the country.


As envisioned by His Highness, the Academies represent both a continuation of that proud tradition and a new direction. In establishing the network of Aga Khan Academies, the Aga Khan Development Network is not moving away from our commitment to those students, families, and teachers who are part of the AKES. In fact, we intend the Academies to become a primary resource for teacher development. The Academys in-house Professional Development Centre with its strong connection to the Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development will also serve AKES teachers and other teachers from government and private schools regionally and nationally. Through this Professional Development Center at the Hyderabad campus, the Aga Khan Academies intend to make a sustained meaningful contribution to the quality of education in India.


In establishing the Academies, we are adding a new dimension to our diverse network of educational institutions. The AKDNs commitment--our tradition -- is to identify particular niches of human need, areas where there is significant human potential that can be developed if given the opportunity. We take care in assessing that need, think creatively and consult broadly in developing sustainable solutions, often quite original, in the form of institutions that will endure and evolve. The niches of human need we identify require bold and creative interventions, and, while we are humble about what we as committed individuals can accomplish in single lifetimes, we take a very long view and have confidence that working together we can effect lasting change.


Hazrat Ali, the first hereditary Imam of the Shia Muslims, emphasized in his teachings that No honor is like knowledge... No belief is like modesty and patience, no attainment is like humility, no power is like forbearance, and no support is more reliable than consultation. The work of creating the Aga Khan Academies honors knowledge and the transformative power knowledge has in peoples lives and in the future of society. We also take a fundamentally consultative approach to the work keeping our minds open to what others can teach us and connecting it to what we know and the particular challenges that we face. We approach all of what we do with modesty and patience, and yet, as my colleagues would tell you, we also bring a sense of urgency to our work every day matters.

And this days Foundation Stone-Laying Ceremony matters. It marks the beginning of the physical establishment of the Aga Khan Academy in Hyderabad, an institution for which we have developed a clear vision and plans, and yet which will take some time to create and even longer to have the impact on society that we expect it to have.


The underlying idea of the Aga Khan Academys network is to concentrate substantial resources on those exceptional individuals students and teachers who have the potential to transform society. This commitment stems from the fact that, provided with a world-class education, exceptional students from any background can fully achieve their significant potential and in so doing improve their lives, the lives of their families, their communities, their country, and the world. Providing a rich learning environment in which those rare intellectual and personal gifts can be fully developed and at the same time instilling a sense of social responsibility in these bright young minds, this is the philosophy behind the Aga Khan Academies.

We humbly hope that the global network of Aga Khan Academies will become as successful and enduring as the AKDN itself. To be sure, we are at this time a nascent program. Three years have not yet passed since we opened the very first Academy in Mombasa, Kenya. The campus there is still taking shape as we add the residential facilities. We see the Mombasa Academy as our test-bed, our intellectual trampoline on which we can develop and refine the program for the network of Academies. And yet it is not an experimental school: I am proud of our most recent International examination results, placing the school in the top tier of performance world-wide. In addition, students and faculty in Mombasa are setting new national records in swimming, adding local culture to a world class education through visiting artists programmes gaining a true appreciation of their peoples needs by working regularly in a local village with their less privileged brethren. In sum, the Academy is becoming the vibrant, healthy and rewarding learning environment of the sort we aim to create right here in Hyderabad.

In closing, we would all like to thank your Highness for your inspiring leadership, for your vision identifying important human needs, your commitment to tackling them with creative, bold initiatives and staying with them until the solutions are institutionalized.


Thank you.

Foundation Stone-Laying Ceremony of the Aga Khan Academy, Hyderabad

22 September 2006

Your Excellency the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh,
Honorable Ministers,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies And Gentlemen:


Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim


Let me begin by thanking all of you for honoring us by joining in this celebration at this truly magnificent site. We are most deeply grateful to all who helped to make this site available to our Academy program. Your generosity will be a continuing inspiration to us all.


Our celebration today is part of a long, unfolding story. It is, for me, a highly personal story growing out of my familys active involvement through the years in the field of education especially in the developing world.

It was just about a century ago that my grandfather, Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah Aga Khan, began to build a network of educational institutions in places where the Ismaili community had settled. This network would eventually include some 300 schools 200 of which my grandfather opened personally.

In addition, he was the founding figure of Aligarh University, and I have continued that tradition through the establishment of the Aga Khan University and the University of Central Asia.

The tradition I am describing, however, goes back much further than one hundred years. For it was some one thousand years ago that my forefathers, the Fatimid Imam-Caliphs of Egypt, founded Al-Azhar University and the Academy of Knowledge in Cairo. For well over a millennium, the pursuit of knowledge has been a central element in our tradition.

Against this background, you can understand why this new educational beginning means so much to us.

But even while we renew a rich tradition inherited from the past, we are also looking deeply into the future. What we begin here may not have its full impact in any of our lifetimes. But the beginnings we undertake today may well be among the most important things we will ever do.

I would like to speak initially about the logic behind the Aga Khan Academies program to look at its philosophical underpinnings. For unless those foundations are sound, whatever we build will be inherently vulnerable.

We are taking our time in laying those foundations. We are designing for the long-range future and we have thought long and hard about our goals and how to achieve them. We have launched research projects and surveys. We have done our homework.

At the very heart of our conclusions is one, central conviction: the key to future progress in the developing world will be its ability to identify, to develop, and to retain expert and effective home-grown leadership.

In our lifetimes, the developing world has looked in various directions for the key to progress. For a while, it was thought to be enough that indigenous peoples simply throw off the yoke of colonialism which for some was the most important barrier to fulfillment and progress. This viewpoint often evolved into a hope that reasserting cultural identity would unlock the future and education sometimes became mainly a matter of tapping into ancient wisdom, expressed in distinctive languages. In many places, the promises of a charismatic ruler also captured the public imagination the mystique of the romantic hero and public education sometimes slipped into relative insignificance.

Over time, as frustration mounted, other cures were entertained in parts of the developing world. Ideologies of the left and the right came into vogue ranging from the siren songs of state socialism on one side to the allure of unrestrained capitalism on the other. The demands of dogma came to replace the disciplines of reason and education too often turned into indoctrination.

But none of these approaches proved adequate to the demands of their times and all of them seem increasingly inadequate to the demands of the present. A different approach has been needed. I would note that the people of this city and this region were among those who first came to realize this fact and to respond impressively to the challenge.

That response here and elsewhere has had, as its centerpiece, a distinctive intellectual style and a creative approach to leadership. As the pace of history has accelerated, agility and adaptability have become more important qualities than mere size or strength, and the race of life has gone increasingly to the nimble and the knowledgeable.

As the economic arena has been globalizing, openness and flexibility have become prerequisites for progress, and success has gone more and more to those who can connect and respond.

Specialized expertise, pragmatic temperament, mental resourcefulness these are increasingly the keys to effective leadership along with a capacity for intellectual humility which keeps ones mind constantly open to a variety of viewpoints and welcomes pluralistic exchange.

In such a world, the most important thing a student can learn is the ability to keep on learning.

What these developments mean is human resources have become more important than natural resources in determining the wealth of a society. And yet, there are still too many communities in which the true potential of the human resource base is sadly underdeveloped.

Too many of those who ought to be leading their communities in the hopeful world of tomorrow, are being left behind in the real world of today. Because good schools are not available to them early in life, they are often blocked from such opportunities as they grow older. And even those who do break through, into a world of wider educational opportunity, too often also break out and leave their home regions. The result is a widening gap between the expert and effective leadership these communities need and the leadership their educational systems are likely to deliver.

Am I saying that we should focus only on educating a leadership elite? Not by any means. Broad public education is still an essential obligation of a just society. But I also believe that the best interests of every society will be best served if its future leaders can be adequately prepared for an unusually demanding future if its outstanding students, in short, can be given an outstanding education.

Every society develops and depends on some set of leaders but the great question is how those leaders are developed and chosen. For much of human history, leaders were born into their roles, or they fought their way in or they bought their way in. Elites were normally based on physical power, or accumulated wealth, or inherited claims to authority.

But social progress can be greatest when aristocracies of class give way to aristocracies of talent or to use an even better term to meritocracies.

The well-led society of the future, in my view, will be a meritocracy where leadership roles are based on personal and intellectual excellence.

Our goal, then, is not to provide special education for a privileged elite but to provide an exceptional education for the truly exceptional.

This is the fundamental philosophy undergirding our Academies program.

How, then, will these goals be realized in practice? In all candor, some of our plans may have few precedents in this country and may strike some observers here as new and distinctive. But we have seen them tested in other contexts and believe they represent worthwhile challenges.

Our plans begin with the realization that governments alone cannot meet the educational challenges of the 21st century. Nor can private institutions which are constrained by the necessity to earn a profit. The answer lies in the expanding role of civil society in voluntary institutions which are not governmental but which are nonetheless dedicated to community values and the public good. We hope that the Aga Khan Academies will become leading exemplars of civil societys potential role.

Access to these schools (each of which will enroll 700 to 1200 young men and women) will thus be based solely on merit not on financial resources. Intellectual capacity and intrinsic character will determine not only who is admitted, but who is actively recruited for matriculation at these schools must go beyond passive selection and include an active outreach effort.

Once admitted, students will pursue a diverse and balanced curriculum, one which will evolve constantly as learning expands at an unprecedented pace. The best schools of the future will be those which select wisely just what learning will best help prepare students for an unpredictable future.

Our curriculum will be designed to qualify students for the widely-respected International Baccalaureate degree and beyond that, for admission to the very best university programs that may interest them in India and in every part of the world.

The International Baccalaureate program will help us prepare students to meet world-class standards joining a community of some 1800 other schools who use the IB framework, including highly respected institutions here in India. Using that framework, we can ensure that the education we provide will be tied to global concerns and keep pace with global developments.

But the Aga Khan Academies will also have their own areas of special emphasis, including: an explicit concern for the value of pluralism, a strong emphasis on the ethical dimensions of life, a more specialized knowledge of how global economics work, and a focus on comparative political systems.

We are often told these days that tension and violence in much of the world grows out of some fundamental clash of civilizations especially a clash between the Islamic world and the West. I disagree with that assessment. In my view, it is a clash of ignorances which is to blame. The Academies will seek to remedy such ignorances through the broad study of a variety of world cultures, including the Study of Muslim Civilizations, a subject which is often overlooked in some parts of the world today.

The principal language of instruction will be English todays primary language of global connection. But connectedness will also be enhanced in other ways. Every graduate will at least be bilingual, for example, and many will be trilingual. In his or her home Academy, a student will not only meet other students from a variety of cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds but they will get to know one another as friends and neighbors something that residential schools are well-equipped to foster. And many will study for at least a year outside their home cultures, as well.

Each of our Academies can be thought of, in sum, as a center for cross-cultural education. And the City of Hyderabad, with its rich history as a meeting point for different cultures, including the Christian, Hindu and Muslim traditions, will provide a particularly appropriate setting.

The spirit of pluralism will be further enhanced by the fact that each Academy will be part of a larger network. All of them will be linked electronically and will serve students and faculty throughout the system through video-conferencing and other distance learning technology--as well as through programs whereby teachers and students will work for a time in a distant setting.

Building a global network of Academies will enable us to pursue simultaneously two sometimes divergent goals. On the one hand we want our students to understand and appreciate the variety of the world and the diversity of its peoples. On the other hand, we want to ensure a certain consistency in the quality of instruction and in the pursuit of core values. Building a wide network of schools around the same fundamental principles will allow us to pursue both of these objectives.

There will be one teacher for about every seven students at our Academies, and the teachers will not only be actively recruited, carefully selected and equitably compensated, but they will also be expertly trained and continually retrained. World class standards are ever-evolving standardsstaying on the cutting edge is a not a static process. Not only will we need highly professional instructors, but we must also be sure that our instructors are well-instructed. State-of-the art teaching technologies will help our faculties as they reach for this goal.

In short, we seek not only to train the next generation of expert leaders, but also to develop a professional corps of world-class teachers. Emblematic of this commitment is the fact that a Professional Development Center, focused on the improvement of teaching, will be part of the central Academic Building on each of our campuses. If all goes well, teachers at the Aga Khan Academies will become role models not only for their students, but for other teachers in their communities.

We also realize, as I have already suggested, that much of what our students will learn over time they will learn from one another not only in formal classroom settings but in residential and social contexts, in a wide range of extracurricular activities and in community service projects, as well. The Academies will be concerned with the whole of the human being mind, body and spirit and with the broad range of human aspiration intellectual, moral, artistic, physical and spiritual. The fact that these are residential academies will contribute enormously to these broad objectives, encouraging students to identify more completely with the school, to help lead it and shape its environment.

We envision that our graduates will emerge as well rounded men and women, enriched by their participation not only in rich learning communities but in rich living communities as well.

All of these commitments imply a special emphasis on the quality of our physical resources on the built environment, as it is often called including the quality of architectural design. As it has so often been said, we first shape our buildings, and then they shape us.

In sum, the Academies will be serious, focused, rigorous environments but at the same time they will be spacious and joyous places. They will operate on the cutting edge of knowledge and pedagogy, but they will be rooted in history and steeped in tradition.

It is such an institution that I hope to bring to the city of Hyderabad.

Thank you.

Address by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Commencement Ceremony of the American University (Cairo, Egypt)

15 June 2006

President Arnold,
Members of the Board of Trustees,
Members of the Faculty and Administration,
Parents and Families,
Distinguished guests,
And, most importantly, the Graduating Class
Congratulations

I deeply appreciate your warm welcome and I am most grateful for the wonderful honor you are conferring upon me through this honorary degree. I have long been a great admirer of the American University in Cairo - and I am proud that I can now count myself among your alumni.

This is a very special University. For 87 years, it has been a place for creative and constructive interaction between East and West. Its success has inspired those who see the future as one of intercultural cooperation and collaboration, rather than intercultural clash.

The new campus you are building will be a splendid physical manifestation of that vision. But it is even more important that this vision be manifested in the years ahead in your own, individual lives.

Most of you share with me a common cultural background. I was born into a Muslim family, educated as a Muslim and spent many years studying Muslim history. Then, almost fifty years ago, I became Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims, responsible both for interpreting the faith to the community, and for helping improve the quality and security of the communitys daily life. From that day to this, my dominant preoccupation has been with the developing world, and particularly the countries of South and Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where Ismailis are concentrated among other Muslim populations.

Over these five decades, I have watched that world oscillate constantly, between hope and disappointment.


Too often, disappointment has been the dominant story. And too often the dominant response to disappointment has been to embrace false hopes - from dogmatic socialism to romantic nationalism, from irrational tribalism to runaway individualism.


Another response has been to revisit past glories - contrasting them with contemporary setbacks. Many Muslims in particular, recall a time when Islamic civilizations were on the cutting edge of world progress. They dream of renewing that heritage. But they are not sure how to do so.


For some, renewal means recovering old forms of the faith - while for others it means rejecting faith itself. For some, recovering glory means opposition to the West, its cultures and its economic systems - while for others it means partnering with non-Islamic societies.


As university graduates, you will be fashioning your own visions for the future and your own ways of fulfilling them. But as you do, I hope you will honor the values of this University. For the one ingredient which holds particular promise in the search for fulfillment, is the search for knowledge.


From the very beginnings of Islam, the search for knowledge has been central to our cultures. I think of the words of Hazrat Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first hereditary Imam of the Shia Muslims, and the last of the four rightly-guided Caliphs after the passing away of the Prophet (may peace be upon Him). In his teachings, Hazrat Ali emphasized that No honour is like knowledge. And then he added that No belief is like modesty and patience, no attainment is like humility, no power is like forbearance, and no support is more reliable than consultation.


Notice that the virtues endorsed by Hazrat Ali are qualities which subordinate the self and emphasize others - modesty, patience, humility, forbearance and consultation. What he thus is telling us, is that we find knowledge best by admitting first what it is we do not know, and by opening our minds to what others can teach us.

At various times in world history, the locus of knowledge has moved from one centre of learning to another. Europe once came to the Islamic world for intellectual enrichment - and even rediscovered its own classical roots by searching in Arabic texts.


Astronomy, the so-called Science of the Universe was a field of particular distinction in Islamic civilization - in sharp contrast to the weakness of Islamic countries in the field of Space research today. In this field, as in others, intellectual leadership is never a static condition, but something which is always shifting and always dynamic.


Indeed, Islamic culture in past centuries was distinctly dynamic - constantly reaching out - both to India and the East and to Europe and the West - for enrichment. Throughout history, confident cultures from every part of the world have been eager to seek new learning, not to dilute inherited traditions but to amplify and extend them. The great civilizations of Islam were prime examples.


More than a millennium ago, as early as the 8th century, the original Abbasids, ruling as Caliphs in Baghdad, set up academies and libraries where new knowledge was honored - independent of its source. The Fatimids continued this tradition - reaching out from their base in Cairo - established in the 10th century - to welcome learned figures from distant lands. A bit later, Ghazni, in Afghanistan, became another center of learning - again by reaching out.


By the time of the Safavid era - halfway through the second millennium - cultural leaders of all types - mathematicians, scientists, painters, musicians, and writers - were moving constantly from country to country and court to court - from the Safavid centers in Iran to the Mughal courts of India, and the Uzbek court at Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan.

The Ottoman Caliphs in Turkey continued in this proactive tradition in the 19th century, borrowing now from primarily western models. The Ottomans paved the way for the immense modernizations associated with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the twentieth century. Ataturks reforms brought opposition from ulama and others. Nonetheless, scholars have concluded that a great part of the population did not see Ataturk and his reforms as hostile to Islam. Many saw them as extending a well-established pattern.

I believe that same pattern must be our model today. In keeping with our past traditions, and in response to our present needs, we must to go out and find the best of the worlds knowledge - wherever it exists.

But accessing knowledge, is only the first step. The second step - the application of knowledge, is also demanding. Knowledge, after all, can be used well or poorly - for good or evil purposes.

Once we have acquired knowledge, it is important that the ethical guidelines of faith be invoked, helping us apply what we have learned to the highest possible ends. And it is also important that those ends be related to the practical needs of our peoples.

Throughout history, the application of knowledge has often been determined by a few powerful rulersor by highly dominant governments. But I believe the hour is passing for these outmoded, top-heavy ways of deciding how knowledge should be utilized.

Governments role will not disappear, of course. But a variety of new factors are at play--the vast complexity of economic life, the growing pluralism of society, the splintering and decentralization of information media, and the fragmentation of cultural identity. And all of these factors argue for a more diverse approach.

The great effort of humankind to organize itself for the common good must change with changing environments. For thousands of years our environment was largely agricultural, where value attached primarily to land. Three centuries ago, agriculture began to yield to industry, as machines took center stage, along with standardized processes and the efficiencies of scale.

But in the last few decades, Agricultural Society and Industrial Society have gradually been displaced by what has been called the Knowledge Society, propelled by new digital technology and the expansion of cyberspace.

As a result, enormous social influence has been transferred from the owners and workers of farms and factories, to those whom we now call Knowledge Workers, people who create and exchange information. For them, power attaches more to ideas and values than to money or physical force. Among them, power itself is widely dispersed.

In such a time, we need to depend less on government and more on what I call the institutions of civil society. These civil institutions are normally private and voluntary - but they are committed to the public good. They include entities dedicated to education and research, labour and commerce, health and the environment, culture and religion.

Civil institutions can thrive even when governments falter. But they cannot thrive unless governments and citizens also place a high value on diversity, and create a supportive environment for non-governmental initiatives. The graduates of the American University in Cairo can play a critical role in that process.

To do this however, will mean confronting the knowledge deficit which now plagues too many Islamic societies. Happily, technology has given us wonderful new ways of sharing knowledge. Rather than sending scholars over thousands of miles and scores of years, from library to library and academy to academy, today we can simply click in a matter of seconds onto a wide variety of appropriate websites. But, first, we must acknowledge what it is that we do not yet know - committing ourselves to continued learning and accepting the fact that useful knowledge will often be found by reaching beyond the traditional barriers of both geography and culture.

The most valuable part of your University education may not lie merely in the content of what you have learned here, but in your improved ability to go on learning for the rest of your lives.

One certain contributor to the knowledge deficit in large parts of the Islamic world has been the disconnect between weak universities, and the requirements of modern economies. We must understand the intimate connection between the economy of any country and the research agenda of its universities - the fact that research requires the intimate involvement of economic institutions, and that economic development requires the support and the stimulus of cutting edge research.

All of this will help explain why our Aga Khan Development Network has placed such a high priority on the development of Aga Khan supported Universities and Academies in parts of the developing world. And it will also explain my admiration for the work of this University. Along with similar, sister institutions, AUC has effectively combined values and requirements of the Islamic world with educational resources from the Western world. In doing so, it marks a promising pathway to the future.

As graduates of this university, you have already begun your journey down that path - and you are ideally placed to lead others along it. This calling is your special responsibility. But you can take up this obligation knowing that you are well equipped for the road ahead.

In the long sweep of human history, Egypt has been among the first and most distinguished centers of world learning. Building on those traditions, this country and this region can again play a central role in the Knowledge Society of the future - and each of you can be a vital part of that exciting process.

May Allah accompany you.

Thank You.

Address by His Highness the Aga Khan to the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University (Columbia, USA)

15 May 2006

Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim

Dean Anderson,
Faculty Members,
Graduating Students and Parents,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen

I am deeply honoured to be here and deeply grateful for your invitation. This is a memorable day both in your personal lives and in the life of this Schooland I am pleased to share in it.

They say that a good graduation speaker is someone who can talk in someone elses sleep. I hope we can break that pattern today.

An opinion poll reported recently that what American graduates want as their graduation speaker more than anyone is someone they could relate to. But that test, says the poll, showed the most popular university speaker in recent years was the Sesame street character, Kermit the Frog. I found it a bit intimidating to wonder just where the Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims would rank on the relating scale in comparison to Kermit the Frog.

Ceremonies of the sort we observe today are valuable because they help us to bridge the past and the future to see ourselves as players in larger narratives. This Schools narrative is now sixty years old embracing the whole of the postwar period. In that time you have dramatically broadened both the communities you serve and the programs through which you serve them.

Your history reflects a continuing conviction that the challenges of our times are fundamentally global ones calling both for multi-disciplinary and multi-national responses.

Even as SIPA marks its 60th anniversary, I am approaching an anniversary of my own the 50th anniversary next year of my role as Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims.

While I was educated in the West, my perspective over these fifty years has been profoundly shaped by the countries of South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where the Ismaili people live and where they are largely concentrated. For five decades, that has been my world my virtually permanent preoccupation. And it is out of that experience that I speak today.

For the developing world, the past half-century has been a time of recurring hope and frequent disappointment. Great waves of change have washed over the landscape from the crumbling of colonial hegemonies in mid century to the recent collapse of communist empires. But too often, what rushed in to replace the old order were empty hopesnot only the false allure of state socialism, non-alignment, and single-party rule, but also the false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism.

There have been welcome exceptions to this pattern, of course. But too often, one step forward has been accompanied by two steps back. Hope for the future has often meant hope for survival, not hope for progress. The old order yielded its place, but a new world was not ready to be born.

Today, this sense of frustration is compounded both in rich and poor nations by a host of new challenges. They range from changing weather patterns to mutating viruses, from new digital and bio-genetic technologies to new patterns of family life and a new intermingling of cultures.

As the world economy integrates, global migrations are reaching record levels. Immigrants now account for two thirds of the population growth in the 30 developed countries of the OECD. Once homogenous societies are becoming distinctly multi-cultural.

Meanwhile, the gap widens between rich countries and poor. Populations explode and the environment deteriorates. The nation-state itself is newly challenged by the influence of non-state forcesincluding global crime and terrorism.

Whenever I sit down with leading thinkers and policy makers I come away with a haunting question. Why is it, given the scope of our collective learning unprecedented in human history that we have such difficulty in controlling these developments? Why is our growing intellectual mastery of the world so often accompanied in practice by a growing sense of drift?

My response to that question focuses increasingly on the fact that democratic institutions have not lived up to their potential. In both the developed and the developing world, the promise of democracy has too often been disappointed.

For many centuries, enlightened people have argued that democracy was the key to social progress. But today, that contention is in dispute.

In countries where I am directly involved, the 21st century has already experienced at least a half-dozen constitutional crises. The sad fact hard to swallow and difficult to deny is that nearly forty percent of UN member nations are now categorized not merely as failed states but as failed democracies.

Our central challenge in this new century as leaders and future leaders of our world is to renew the democratic promise.

The saving grace which democratic systems are most likely to possess, after all, is that they are self-correcting. A system of public accountability still provides the best hope for change without violence. And that virtue alone redeems the entire concept. It explains Churchills famous view that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others.

Our challenge is not to find alternatives to democracy, but to find more and better ways to make democracy work.

In responding to that challenge today, I would like to make four observations four suggestions for addressing our democratic disappointments and advancing our democratic hopes.

My comments involve, first, the need for greater flexibility in defining the paths to democracy; secondly, the need for greater diversity in the institutions which participate in democratic life; thirdly, the need to expand the publics capacity for democracy; and finally, the need to strengthen public integrity-- on which democracy rests. Let me say a few words about each.

My first concern is that we must define the paths to democracy more flexibly. We like to say that democracy involves a pluralistic approach to life but too seldom do we take a pluralistic approach to democracy. Too often, we insist that democracies must all follow a similar script evolving at a similar pace without recognizing that different circumstances may call for different constructs.

The ultimate recourse in any democracy must be to the concept of popular sovereignty. But within that concept there is room for variation. One size need not fit all and trying to make one size fit all can be a recipe for failure.

The worlds most successful democracies have had widely differing histories each taking its own shape according to its own timetable.


How is power best divided and balanced? How should secular and spiritual allegiances interact? How can traditional authority even monarchical authority relate to democratic frameworks? How is the integrity of minority cultures and faith systems best reconciled with majority rule?

It is simplistic to wish that our democratic destinations should be similar that they cannot be reached by many paths. The democratic spirit of freedom and flexibility must begin with our definitions of democracy itself.

Even as we think more flexibly about democracy, we should also consider a second goal: diversifying the institutions of democratic life.

One of the reasons that governments often fail is that we depend too much on them. We invest too many hopes in political promises and we entrust too many tasks to political regimes.

Governments alone do not make democracy work. The most successful democracies are those in which the non-governmental institutions of civil society also play a vital role.

Civil society is powered by private voluntary energies, but it is committed to the public good. It includes institutions of education, health, science and research. It embraces professional, commercial, labour, ethnic and arts organizations, and others devoted to religion, communication, and the environment.

Sometimes, in our preoccupation with government, we discount the impact of civil society, including the potential of constructive NGOs. But we can no longer afford that outlook. Meeting the realities of a complex world will require a strengthened array of civic institutions. They spur social progress even when governments falter, and because they are so intimately connected to the public, they can predict new patterns and identify new problems with particular sensitivity.

But such developments cannot be coerced. They require an encouraging, enabling environment, supported by a broad public enthusiasm for social goals. And let me be clear: I am here because I believe SIPA, with its annual outpouring of able graduates, can make an enormous worldwide contribution to such a response.

The development of civil society can also help meet the rising challenge of cultural diversity. As communities become more pluralistic in fact, they must also become more pluralistic in spirit. A vibrant civil society can give diverse constituencies effective ways to express and preserve their distinct identities, even as they interact with new neighbours.

We are often told that increased contact among cultures will inevitably produce a Clash of Civilizations, particularly between Islam and the West. Such predictions could become self-fulfilling prophecies if enough people believe them. But that need not, and must not, be the case.

The true problem we face is what I would call a Clash of Ignorance on both sides one which neglects, for example, a long history of respect and cooperation between Islamic and Western peoples, and their respective civilisations.

This is an appropriate place to recall how North American history was shaped over the centuries by diverse cultural groups. In the future as in the past, such diversity can be an engine of enormous creativity if it is sustained by what I would call a new cosmopolitan ethic. To encourage that process, the Aga Khan Development Network has recently formed a partnership with the Government of Canada to create a new Global Centre for Pluralism in Ottawa. Drawing on both the Ismaili experience and the pluralistic model of Canada itself, the Centre recognizes that we cannot make the world safe for democracy unless we also make the world safe for diversity and that strengthening can be achieved by the institutions of civil society. They can contribute significantly to that goal.

My third point involves the public capacity for democratic government. This is a problem we too often treat with too much sentimentality, reluctant to acknowledge that democratic publics are not always all-wise.

Inadequate public communication is part of the problem. Driven by short-term circulation and profit goals, media increasingly tell audiences what they want to hear rather than what they ought to hear. And what too many people want is not to be informed, but to be entertained.

One result is the inadequacy of international news. I am told that world news now represents a substantially lower percentage of mainstream American news than it did a generation ago. Thanks to the Internet, specialists can get more information from more places than ever before. But for the general public, in America and elsewhere, global information has declined, while global involvements have expanded.

If better communication is one part of the answer, better education is another. This means, above all, developing new curricula which will meet new demands especially in developing countries. We must do more to prepare the leaders of the 21st century for economic life in a global marketplace, for cultural life in pluralistic societies, for political life in complex democracies. Our system of Aga Khan-sponsored universities and academies is working throughout the developing world to create new educational models. But the scale of our work only begins to address the enormity of the challenge.

Improved communication and education can be helpful, but we also must be realistic about public capabilities. I believe, for example, that publics are too often asked to vote on issues that bewilder them. In recent months, both in Africa and in Asia new national constitutions have been left to the mercies of mass public referenda posing complex, theoretical issues well beyond the ability of politicians to explain, and publics to master. Nor is this matter unique to the developing world. We saw a similar pattern last year when the French public rejected a new European constitutional treaty that was 474 pages long.

Democracies need to distinguish responsibly between the prerogatives of the people and the obligations of their leaders. And leaders must meet their obligations. When democracies fail, it is usually because publics have grown impatient with ineffectual leaders and governments.

When parliaments lack the structure or expertise to grapple with complex problems or when a system of checks and balances stymies action rather than refining it then disenchanted publics will often turn to autocrats. The UN Development Program recently reported, for example, that 55 percent of those surveyed in 18 Latin American countries would support authoritarian rule if it brought economic progress. There, in too many cases progress and democracy have not gone hand in hand.

The best way to redeem the concept of democracy around the world is to improve the results it delivers. Developed countries, rather than talking so much about democracy on the conceptual level, must do more much more to help democracy work on a practical level. Our goal must be fully functioning democracies which bring genuine improvements in the quality of life for their peoples. We must not force publics to choose between democratic government and competent government.

This brings me to my final topic: the need for a sense of greater public integrity.

Expanding the number of people who share social power is only half the battle. The critical question is how such power is used. How can we inspire people to reach beyond rampant materialism, self-indulgent individualism, and unprincipled relativism.

One answer is to augment our focus on personal prerogatives and individual rights, with an expanded concern for personal responsibilities and communal goals. A passion for justice, the quest for equality, a respect for tolerance, a dedication to human dignity these are universal human values which are broadly shared across divisions of class, race, language, faith and geography. They constitute what classical philosophers in the East and West alike have described as human virtue not merely the absence of negative restraints on individual freedom, but also a set of positive responsibilities, moral disciplines which prevent liberty from turning into license.

Historically, one of the most powerful resources for any culture has been the sense that it is heading somewhere, that tomorrow will be better than today, that there is reason to embrace what I would call a narrative of progress.

The right of individuals to look for a better quality of life within their own life-spans and to build toward a better life for their children these are personal aspirations which must become public values.

But a healthy sense of public integrity, in my view, will be difficult to nurture over time without a strong religious underpinning. In the Islamic tradition, the conduct of ones worldly life is inseparably intertwined with the concerns of ones spiritual life and one cannot talk about integrity without also talking about faith.

For Islam, the importance of this intersection is an item of faith, such a profound melding of worldly concerns and spiritual ideals that one cannot imagine one without the other. The two belong together. They constitute a way of life.

From that perspective, I would put high among our priorities, both within and outside the Islamic world, the need to renew our spiritual traditions. To be sure, religious freedom is a critical value in a pluralistic society. But if freedom of religion deteriorates into freedom from religion then I fear we will soon be lost on a bleak and barren landscape with no compass or roadmap, no sense of ultimate direction.

I fully understand the Wests historic commitment to separating the secular from the religious. But for many non-Westerners, including most Muslims, the realms of faith and of worldly affairs cannot be antithetical. If modernism lacks a spiritual dimension, it will look like materialism. And if the modernizing influence of the West is insistently and exclusively a secularising influence, then much of the Islamic world will be somewhat distanced from it.

A deeply rooted sense of public integrity means more than integrity in government, important as that must be. Ethical lapses in medicine and education, malfeasance in business and banking, dishonesty among journalists, scientists, engineers, or scholars all of these weaknesses can undermine the most promising democracies.

Let me finally emphasize my strong conviction that public integrity cannot grow out of authoritarian pronouncements. It must be rooted in the human heart and conscience. As the Holy Quran says: There is no compulsion in religion. The resurgence of spirituality potentially such a positive force can become a negative influence when it turns into self-righteousness and imposes itself on others. Like all of the worlds great religions, Islam warns against the danger of comparing oneself with God, and places primary emphasis on the qualities of generosity, mercy and humility.

A central element in any religious outlook, it seems to me, is a sense of human limitation, a recognition of our own creature-hood a posture of profound humility before the Divine. In that sensibility lies our best protection against divisive dogmatism and our best hope for creative pluralism.

In conclusion, then, I would ask as you move out from this University into a diverse and demanding world that you think about four considerations for renewing the promise of democracy: defining democratic paths more flexibly; expanding the role of civil society; increasing public capacities for self-governance; and strengthening our commitment to public integrity.

In all these ways, I believe we can help restore confidence in the promise of democratic life, affirming with pride our distinct cultural identities, while embracing with enthusiasm our new global potentials.

To the graduants, my prayer is that God may guide you and accompany you as you fulfil your destinies.

Thank You.