Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III

by

Swati Mukherjee

• LAST MODIFIED: 19 February 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195390155-0314

Introduction

Born in 1877 in Karachi into an illustrious family that left Qajar Persia and sought shelter in colonial India, Sultan Muhammad Shah became the forty-eighth Imam of the Nizari Ismaʿili branch of the Shiʿa Muslims at the tender age of eight. Succeeding his father Ali Shah Aga Khan II (b. 1830–d. 1885) as the Shiʿa Ismaʿili community’s spiritual leader in 1885, a genealogy traced back to the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, that is, Imam Ali, Sultan Muhammad Shah Aga Khan III held office of the imamate until his demise in 1957. During his imamate the Nizari Ismaʿilis witnessed momentous socioreligious reforms in the face of colonial modernity, with early experiments beginning in South Asia and parts of Africa but gradually radiating outward along transregional and increasingly global pathways. Yet, there were also critiques and schisms. Striking at once a delicate balance between an Enlightenment-inspired European modernity and a reassertion of core Shiʿa Ismaʿili traditions, Aga Khan III guided and repositioned the Nizari Ismaʿili community amid the changing politico-social exigencies in colonial South Asia as well as in the larger global arena. This was made possible not only in the realm of ideas and abstract notions but effectively on the ground thanks to a robust institutional framework that forged a global community of believers subsumed within a larger pan-Islamic vision under the auspices of the imamate. Yet, distinctive denominational traits were not only retained but were recast within the mold of the burgeoning institutional enterprise. Indeed, such features were often argued to be the very fount of the community’s strength and resilience amid the vicissitudes of historical processes. Furthermore, an important feature of this venture of institutionalization was the guiding vision to both conceptualize and articulate within its institutional mechanism discourses of social service and community development, gradually also marking the early stirrings of an enduring process that went on to cater to a much larger audience beyond the Ismaʿili community. This period thus marked the emergence of a modern Ismaʿili community under the guidance of an imamate that had come to redefine its leadership in terms of a significantly expanded role. It also left behind a template for the succeeding imam of the time, Shah Karim Aga Khan IV (b. 1936–), to emulate and further build on. Much of this history, however, becomes better intelligible when read against the larger backdrop of the 19th-century developments in colonial South Asia. The present article provides a critical review of the existing corpus of English-language scholarship in this field.

General Overviews

Daftary 2007 (1990) provides a comprehensive account of the community from its earliest days through its more recent history. Khan and Moir 1999 foregrounds the pressing need to examine premodern history of the Ismaʿili community in the Indian subcontinent with reference to the rich heritage of shared religious practices, if at times also resorting to tactical spiritual dissimulation (taqiyya) in hostile environments. Efforts to (re)define the Ismaʿilis in modern times can be traced first and foremost to the legal disputes in the Bombay High Court in the later part of the nineteenth century. Moving away from earlier forms of what Khan 2004 calls “threshold” or “liminal” nature of the community, these long-drawn legal polemics spurred the community’s (re)definition in terms of streamlined sectarian and religious identity. Green 2011 invokes market metaphors and provides a critical account of Bombay’s “religious economy” that saw the development inter alia of a “Neo-Ismāʿīlism,” a complex, multifaceted process that was also closely interwoven with the development of Bombay as a commercial and industrial hub in the western Indian Ocean world. Masselos 1973 posits that Aga Khan I’s (b. 1804–d. 1881) arrival in Bombay from Persia stoked a shift toward a close-knit discourse of community membership displacing earlier modes of amorphousness. Shodhan 2001 explores the Aga Khan Case (1866) of the Khojas (alongside the legal polemics among the Pushtimarga Vaishnavas) in the historical context of evolution of a colonial legal episteme and its ramifications for rival groups within different colonized communities. The recourse to legal adjudication of ostensibly religious matters had momentous repercussions for the very definition of religious law, relevance of customs, and religious and/or spiritual authority. Purohit 2012 illustrates how the Aga Khan case, like contemporaneous developments within the Swami Narayan “sect,” stoked efforts to streamline a religious identity in consonance with the exigencies of hegemonic colonial episteme against the larger backdrop of precolonial Indic and Fatimid cultural legacies. Asani 2011 provides a succinct account of a transition from fluid precolonial Satpanthi traditions to a coherent Ismaʿili Khoja identity in colonial and postcolonial times. Khan 2010 points to Aga Khan III’s role in the fin de siècle to neatly demarcate boundaries of his community, although taqiyya arguably persist among the Imamshahis even in postcolonial India. Daftary 2011 is in an edited collection with a rich variety of contributions on the modern history of the different branches of the Ismaʿilis.

• Asani, Ali S. “From Satpanthi to Ismaili Muslim: The Articulation of Ismaili Khoja Identity in South Asia.” In A Modern History of the Ismailis: Continuity and Change in a Muslim Community. Edited by Farhad Daftary, 95–128. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011.

  A short and useful survey of the emergence of an Ismaʿili identity in modern South Asia with focus at once on the religious, intellectual, and institutional aspects of the history.

• Daftary, Farhad. The Ismaʿilis: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511497551

  A seminal survey of the history of the worldwide Ismaʿili community from its earliest days through the modern times, with reference to its internal divisions, shifting historical contexts, and resultant changes that the community witnessed over centuries. Useful at once for students, academics, and an educated audience interested in the subject.

• Daftary, Farhad, ed. A Modern History of the Ismailis: Continuity and Change in a Muslim Community. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011.

  An important collection that brings together contributions to the history of different branches of the Ismaʿilis—the Nizaris and the Musta‘lis and their different groups—across diverse cultural and geographical locales while remaining sensitized to the ideas, institutions, and networks that hold them together. A number of the contributions trace the passage to modernity, its different trajectories with reference to these cultural specificities, and the global spread of the community.

• Green, Nile. Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511975165

  A key study of Christian missionary and reformist activism, existing religious orders, and burgeoning Persian and Central Asian religio-cultural imports in colonial Bombay. Interrogates contesting forces of miracles, traditionalist reformism, and scriptural Islam, all catering to a clientele that cut across a wide spectrum of the society, from industrial population through liberal reformist cohorts. On “Neo-Ismāʿīlism” spearheaded by the “family firm” of the Aga Khans, pp. 155–178.

• Khan, Dominique-Sila. Crossing the Threshold: Understanding Religious Identities in South Asia. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.

  An important intervention that problematizes the “threshold” nature of religio-cultural cosmos of premodern South Asia. It explicates the universalistic claims and distinctive strategies deployed by Ismaʿili preacher-saints against their historical backdrop while also providing a timely reminder of the actors’ agency.

• Khan, Dominique-Sila. “Being One and Many among the Others: Muslim Diversity in the Context of South Asian Religious Pluralism.” In Diversity and Pluralism in Islam: Historical and Contemporary Discourses amongst Muslims. Edited by Zulfiqar Hirji, 43–60. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010.

  On taqiyya of the Imamshahi Guptis, Aga Khan III’s intervention, and the enduring nature of secret religiosities, pp. 53–58 and passim.

• Khan, Dominique-Sila, and Zawahir Moir. “Coexistence and Communalism: The Shrine of Pirana in Gujarat.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 22 (1999): 133–154.

  DOI: 10.1080/00856408708723378

  A case study of Pirana in the western part of the subcontinent with focus on the shared religio-cultural world of premodern times and its subsequent history.

• Masselos, James C. “The Khojas of Bombay: The Defining of Formal Membership Criteria during the Nineteenth Century.” In Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims. Edited by Imtiaz Ahmad, 1–20. Delhi: Manohar, 1973.

  Written in the 1970s, the chapter remains relevant for its concise, instructive study of the socio-religious and legal polemics since the times of Aga Khan I.

• Purohit, Teena. The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2012.

  DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674067707

  A crucial contribution to the understanding of development of religious identity among two comparable communities—the Nizari Khojas and the Swami Narayan “sect”—in colonial South Asia. A key feature of the book is the way it deftly reads the judicial archives in conjunction with an impressive corpus of devotional literature in the vernacular with focus on their dynamic relationship.

• Shodhan, Amrita. A Question of Community: Religious Groups and Colonial Law. Kolkata: Samya, 2001.

  Critical commentary on the emergence in the nineteenth century of religious identity among the Khojas and the Vallabhacharya Vaishnavas with the larger argument that such communities resorted to settle internal civil disputes by invoking colonial intervention and refashioning their internal disputes as “public issues,” aligning themselves with contending claims to religious identity.