[Above] At the Grand Prix de Paris, the Aga Khan gazes at his favorite companion, Dolores Guinness, widow of bis late half brother and member of a British banking family. With them are the Aga’s close friend, Banker Jean-Jacques Cornet- Epinat, and his British mother, Joan Aly Khan.

[Below] In Sardinia, where he has a 20-year development project, Prince Karim is host to Actor Peter Sellers and England’s Princess Margaret, When the phone rings there, he answers with fluency in English, French or Italian.

With all his duties, “I have time to be a big brother”. Aboard his yacht Amaloun, Prince Karim clowns with his half sister Yasmin, 17, daughter of Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth. “I’m delighted if she comes to me with problems. I still have time to be a big brother.”

“WHAT HE DID IS NOTHING SHORT OF MIRACULOUS“

di Thomas Thompson ⇒

By political design, Prince Karim’s grandfather, the Aga Khan 111, blended the “unblendable” East with the West. He was born in Karachi of Persian parentage. His training in the Moslem tradition was tempered by wide exposure to Western history and philosophy. Immune to the endless titter of columnists-over his limitless wealth, his turtle like 240-lb. corpulence, his procession of beautiful wives-he ended his 72-year reign as Imam in 1957. He died a statesman without a state, but more than anyone else he was credited with establishment of the All-India Moslem League which led to the creation of the nation of Pakistan. He served as president of the League of Nations Assembly. He was weighed at various times against silver, gold, platinum and diamonds, the money invariably going to the welfare of his Ismaili subjects.

It was surely something more than considerations of “youth” that prompted the Aga in his will to sidestep his playboy son Aly Khan in favor of his more diligent grandson. The choice was a surprise, but a characteristic last stroke of political acumen. “What Prince Karim has done is nothing short of miraculous,” says an African leader who is not a Moslem.

“It is now clear why his grandfather selected him.”

Aga Khan IV, like his grandfather, has come to realize the importance of modernization to the revival of his sect. Exercising the power to issue Armans (edicts), he has made rulings deeply affecting the political and social lives of his subjects. One major decision enforced by Prince Karim was to order that his subjects must become loyal citizens of the countries in which they resided. Hundreds of thousands of his community had migrated from India and Pakistan to Africa, retaining their old citizenships.

Recognizing the potential problems created by minorities -his minorities who retained only a tenuous link to their first nationalities, Prince Karim ordered his people to change their passports. It proved a wise move, since some African nations have thrown out migrants on the ground of non-citizenship. Prince Karim has ordered mass migrations of his people from countries where they face trouble and persecution. Thus 3,000 Moslems moved to Kenya from South Africa, where the strict racial laws classified them as non-whites. The prince has visited at least 90% of his community, going to the most remote villages in Africa, where he was received with the pomp that a British monarch used to get when Britain had an empire. He spends at least three or four months a year flying in his black-and-gold million-dollar Mystère jet to Africa and to the Middle East and Far East-all just to see his people, He is annoyed when Westerners wonder how he can function. as a religious leader, spending as much time as he does in Europe where there are no Ismailis. “I see my people more than the Pope and other less mobile religious leaders do,” he has said privately. “And I can reach my people almost over-night if they need me.

His people, 15 million Ismailis, are a subdivision of the broader Moslem sect of Shia, which holds that the power of the Imam is hereditary, passing down the line of Mohammed’s male progeny. But Ismail, Prince Karim explains, “is more than a religion. It is a way of life.” To Westerners it is a curious way of life. There is no central seat for the church, such as the Vatican, nor are there priests. There are representatives of the Imam in each community and they lead prayers in the mosques, but they are also ordinary businessmen who marry and have no religious power over members of the mosques. That power is invested solely in the Aga Khan. His authority is roughly analogous to that of the Pope in Roman Catholicism, and he is considered the only mediator between his people and God. The Aga Khan. is not considered divine, but he is a direct descendant of Mohammed and can trace his ancestry back over more than a thousand years to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima.

The Aga Khan has taken the enormous pool of wealth of which he is custodian and has transformed it into a thriving financial empire for his people. In 1960 he set up seven large concerns, called industrial promotion services, which resemble America’s market research studies. These organizations send experts to Asian and African areas to determine what industries can be developed. More than 60 new companies have been set up, ranging from razor blade factories and chemical plants to a jute factory in Pakistan employing 30,000. Altogether more than 200,- 30,000 persons work in businesses organized by the Aga Khan-not without a great deal of tussle among his own people, particularly the old-time businessmen who thought Prince Karim too young and naive in business matters. The profits from these enterprises are plowed back into a growing education network-nursery schools, medical schools and a series of modern hospitals, a system of low-cost medical insurance and low-cost building loans.

If Prince Karim can be said to have a headquarters, it is his house in Paris. This is a magnificent 13th Century converted monastery on the Ile de la Cité in the Seine. The tapestry-hung walls are a foot thick, and inside them the 20th Century seems far away. He likes candles and often has 200 ablaze for an informal dinner. He is generally in Paris only during the French horse-racing season, from May to July. He rises at 6 a.m., and his day is seldom over before past midnight. Business conferences generally extend nightly into the dinner hour. For rest, Prince On the Karim has three retreats: “On Mediterranean for a cruise, at my little house in Normandy where there is no phone, and in the Swiss Alps where I go to a really remote skiing area and ski from morning to night for four days until I can’t look at a pair of skis. After that my battery is charged and I’m set to go.”

Prince Karim has a frustrated desire to write. But he has little time for writing-or reading. Any reading time goes to such newspapers as Paris Herald Tribune or Le Monde, and to scholarly publications like the Swiss Review of World Affairs or Scientific American: “I have to keep up with things so that if anybody asks me about desalinization plants or radio communication, I can answer him.”

He is relentlessly demanding with his employes (who call him “H.H.,” short for “His Highness”), and sharp in a business conference. “In the middle of a long and complicated conference,” says an aide, “His Highness will suddenly cut right through the details and ask the one penetrating question. He has this incredible radar for a business deal, inherited no doubt from his grandfather.”

From his father, Aly Khan, whose spectacular life (including two marriages, one to Rita Hayworth) was snuffed out in a 1961 car crash, Prince Karim inherited the enormous family horseracing enterprise. But, he says, “I debated with myself a long while before I decided to continue it. I knew nothing about horses and had no interest in them, unlike my grand-father and my father. Out of respect for family tradition, I decided to try it. I asked incredibly stupid questions and I still do.”

The red-and-green colors of the Aga Khan have flashed home winners enough to make the “hobby,” as Prince Karim calls it, a highly successful one. He formed a syndicate for his prize horse Silver Shark and sold a million dollars’ worth of shares. He recently turned down an offer of a million pounds sterling ($2.8 million) from a similar syndicate for his champion horse Charlottesville.

His other major private enterprise is his development of the Sardinian resort, Costa Smeralda, the Emerald Coast, In this case he formed a syndicate with some of his friends, relatives and business acquaintances and bought up 38 miles of coastline and some 13,000 hectares (32,123 acres). He even bought unnecessary acreage to keep speculators from moving in and throwing up the motley structures which often destroy the beau ty of the French and Italian coasts.

“We are tough about our standards,” he says. The standards include architectural styles which he describes as a “modern interpretation of traditional Sardinian architecture,” but which might better be called “instant ancient.” The major hotels, of which there are now five, already look as if they have stood for 100 years, with soft, faded pastel pinks and browns that give a weatherbeaten look, concealing the luxurious interiors where bartenders mix martinis and French chefs prepare Chateaubriand. “This is a 20-year project,” Prince Karim says. “If it works we will have 40 to 50 hotels, hundreds of villas and apartments, and accommodations for 100,000 people all in an uncrowded atmosphere.

The resort truly began from scratch, Prince Karim’s consortium had to build highways and villages, bring water from 10 miles away, clear out harbors. It now boasts the most attractive yacht harbor in the Mediterranean.

Proof of Prince Karim’s success appeared this fall when millionaire Greek yachtsmen like Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos forsook their normal haunts in Portofino and Capri for the Sardinian coast. The creation of the resort has jolted the Sardinian economy alive, creating-directly or indirectly-jobs for some 5,000 people.

Prince Karim is often seen strolling across the piazza of the little village he has built literally from nothing. He is eager to receive the slightest bit of information from guests about the merits or demerits of Costa Smeralda. This news is not always good, but he does not expect it to be; if a royal duke thinks a chambermaid was surly or found the coffee cold, Karim wants to know about that too, “The slightest detail is most important in tourism,” he says. “I tend to hide from crowds, but I do need to know what people are thinking.”

There seems little doubt that Sardinia will flourish. Nor is there much doubt that the new Aga’s holdings and his people in Africa and the Middle East will benefit.

It is an equally good bet that Prince Karim will continue to lead an altogether private life and stay out of the gossip columns in which his father’s name appeared so regularly. Having inherited a title from his grandfather and a reputation from his father, Prince Karim is trying to live up to one and live down the other.

Prince Karim discusses woven goods market with a Sardinian peasant woman. He calls Sardinian project “a major venture in my life. If this works, I want no credit for it”.