Ismaili.NET - Heritage F.I.E.L.D.

THE MOST IMPOkfANT PROBLEM

An extroct from a speech of His Highness The Ago Khan given at Ismailia Association of Pakistan

The most important problem for us today is to create students who are capable of going back and of reading the original texts of our history, of reading these texts in Arabic, of reading them in Persian, of reading them in Urdu, of reading them in Gujarati, of reading them in any language in which they have been written.

More than ever today we must be able to publish authoritative docu­ments based on primary sources. There is no point in our reading, re-reading and re-reading third-hand or fourth-hand documents. We can only get tied up in other peoples' interpretations, get further and further away from the original concept and thoroughly muddle and cloud what should be the truth.

I would like the Association in the years to come to do everything possible, including pick its best students and grant them scholarships to study in universities where they read Persian or Arabic, or to go to other parts of Pakistan where they will learn fluent and high class Urdu.

I advise the Association strongly to work along the lines of creating students who will know enough about our history, so that when they go out to study these original documents they will know first of all what they are looking for, because there is no point in going out and taking a lot of material, and reading it and saying, now what am I looking for. You must look for it and then you will find it.

The other point of importance is to present your history in a logical form. When you are taking the type of advanced education that you must get for the university degrees today, you must have in every walk of life a logical concept. This does not mean to wipe away faith. But the real principle of Islam is that faith is logical. Islam would not be what it is if it were not logical.