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Speech by His Highness The Aga Khan IV

Toronto April 27, 1983

(at the banquet with Ontario political government leaders including Premier William Davis)

Your Honour, Honourable Premier, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure for my wife and I to be here this evening. And we are most grateful to you, Mr. Davis, and to you, Mr. McLaren, both for your welcome and for your appreciative remarks about the Ismaili community in Canada.

During this visit, our travels to British Columbia, to the prairies, to Quebec and now to Ontario have reminded us of the far-ranging physical diversity, the beauty and the vast natural resources of this great country. But even more, we have appreciated the warmth of the hospitality accorded us by everyone we have met, a warmth which is so happily characteristic of Canadians. The welcome which Canada has given the many members of my community who have settled here has been equally heart-warming and I am delighted that the first project launched to commemorate this silver jubilee of my accession to the Imamate of the Shia Ismaili Muslims should have been the Jamaat Khana at Burnaby in Vancouver.

I was here last July for the foundation ceremony and now, nine months later, we are nearing the end of the jubilee year. As you can imagine, those nine months have been extremely crowded ones for us. We have celebrated the silver jubilee with our communities in countries as different as Pakistan and Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Tanzania, Portugal and Kenya.

These celebrations have been marked by the launching of many new projects for and extensions to the Aga Khan Health and Education Services as well as wide-ranging programs in housing, rural support and economic development. Ever since I assumed the responsibilities of the Imamate in 1957, my aim has been not simply to help improve the quality of life of people in the Third World, but also to create institutions which would bridge the gulf between communities, faiths and ethnic groups as well as between the developed and the developing worlds. This aspiration, I feel, is particularly appropriate to the Imamate because of its commitment to broad social objectives within the all-embracing humanistic teaching of Islam and because of the way in which the members of the Ismaili community are increasingly spanning both worlds.

Appropriately, the major event of the jubilee year has been the granting of the Chanta to the Aga Khan University in Karachi by the President of Pakistan on March the 16th. This university, which will stand at the apex of our educational and medical institutions, will be international and we plan for it to have faculties in other countries besides Pakistan. Meanwhile, the first faculty, that of Health Sciences, will form part of a major medical complex including a school of nursing which opened in 1980, a medical college and a 720-bed teaching hospital.

On the day I received its Charter, several distinguished Canadians were present and Canada was much in the minds of all of us because there are close associations between the Aga Khan University and two renowned Canadian institutions the Universities of McGill and McMaster. McMaster has been associated with our nursing school since its inception and, under an agreement signed yesterday, will provide training for our nurse tutors and senior nurses both in Pakistan and at its own hospital. This program will be largely funded by a grant from the Canadian International Development Agency and I cannot mention this without paying generous tribute to the understanding with which Canadian aid is administered.

McGill University, for its part, has provided a distinguished consultant to advise us on setting up a community health program at the medical college and for those who know the third world, they will understand how substantial a challenge and how fundamental an issue it is that we are seeking to address.

Quite separately, since the spring of 1981, the Aga Khan Foundation has been giving financial assistance to the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill and we are now working towards a joint degree program between McGill and the Institute of Islamic Studies in London. This brings me to a subject of which my suitably travels have greatly heightened my awareness, namely the extent to which Islam is understood, or perhaps I should say misunderstood, in the West.

In specialized institutions, such as the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill and the Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies at Toronto University, this perception is, of course, informed and accurate. But the general public, whether in Europe, the United States or in Canada, is often presented by the media especially with a facile, not to say distorted, image. On the contrary, it is my deepest conviction that the silent majority of the Islamic world seeks to heal divisions amongst sects and between faiths, not to exacerbate them, and to hold high the basic tenets of Islam, including the brotherhood of man and the appreciation of the wonder of God's creation.

Canada is uniquely well placed to correct misconceptions about Islam because of the open-mindedness and genuine interest in other peoples of the world which was so clearly stated in the Honourable Premier's speech a few minutes ago. Furthermore, Canada has within her frontiers the necessary centres of learning to explain and to put into perspective those international trends which are important in the closing decades of the 20th century.

To conclude, our own Aga Khan institutions are dedicated to improving the quality of life for those in need of help, especially in the Third World. Canada has a vision of the essential dignity of man for which I have the most profound respect. This is why I am extremely happy that an increasing number of Canadian organizations, both governmental and private, are joining with us in our work.

Thank you.