The funeral of the spiritual leader of the Ismaili community Prince Karim Al-Hussaini Aga Khan IV will take place on Saturday in Lisbon, according to the community leadership. He died on Tuesday at 88.
The philanthropist will be laid to rest at a private burial ceremony in Aswan, Egypt on Sunday, it said in a statement on Thursday.
“This is a private event, not a big public event … It will be short and dignified,” a senior adviser to the Ismaili community, Naguib Kheraj, told a press conference on Thursday.
The Government of Pakistan has declared February 8 a national day of mourning to coincide with the funeral of Prince Karim.
According to a Cabinet Division notification, “Expressing profound grief on behalf of the government and people of Pakistan on the sad demise of his highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, the prime minister has declared a day of national mourning in Pakistan on Saturday, the 8th of February, 2025, on the occasion of the funeral of his high highness.”
His eldest son, 53-year-old Rahim Al-Hussaini, will succeed him and take on the title of Aga Khan V.
Khan IV died at the age of 88 in Lisbon, Portugal. His passing occurred on February 4, surrounded by family.
The global Ismaili community, a sect of Shia Islam, consists of approximately 15 million followers residing in Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North America.
Life of the Aga Khan IV
Prince Shah Karim Al-Husseini was born on Dec 13, 1936 in Geneva and spent his early childhood in Nairobi, Kenya.
He later returned to Switzerland, attending the exclusive Le Rosey School before going to the United States to study Islamic history at Harvard.
When his grandfather Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan died in 1957, he became the imam of the Ismailis at the age of 20.
As Aga Khan — derived from Turkish and Persian words to mean commanding chief — he was the fourth holder of the title which was originally granted in the 1830s by the emperor of Persia to Karim’s great-great-grandfather when the latter married the emperor’s daughter.
The role included providing divine guidance for the Ismaili community, whose members live in Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and North America.
After his father died in May 1960, the Aga Khan initially pondered whether to continue his family’s long tradition of thoroughbred racing and breeding.
But he liked it after winning the French owners’ championship in his first season.
“I have come to love it,” he said in a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair. “It’s so exciting, a constant challenge. Every time you sit down and breed you are playing a game of chess with nature.”
His stables and riders, wearing his emerald-green silk livery, enjoyed great successes with horses like Sea the Stars, which won the Epsom Derby and the 2,000 Guineas; and Sinndar, which also won the Epsom Derby, the Irish Derby and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in the same year, 2000.
But perhaps his most famous horse was Shergar, which won the Epsom Derby, the Irish Derby and the King George, before being kidnapped in February 1983 from Ireland’s Ballymany stud farm.
A ransom demand was made, with the mafia, former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the IRA all suggested as suspects. No money was paid, and no trace of the horse was ever found.
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The Aga Khan set up the Aga Khan Development Network in 1967. The group of international development agencies employs 80,000 people helping to build schools and hospitals and providing electricity for millions of people in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia.
He mixed his development work with private business, owning for example in Uganda a pharmaceutical company, a bank and a fishnet factory.
“Few persons bridge so many divides — between the spiritual and the material; East and West; Muslim and Christian — as gracefully as he does,” Vanity Fair wrote in its 2013 article.
He was married twice, first in 1969 to former British model Sarah Croker Poole, with whom he had a daughter and two sons. The couple divorced in 1995.
In 1998 he married German-born Gabriele zu Leiningen, with whom he had a son. The couple divorced in 2014.