Thin, bristling Police Commissioner Jean Eglenne of Cannes announced importantly: "We must reconstruct the crime." The criminals were still at large, but the victims willingly played their parts. The tubby Aga Khan, his pretty wife, a maid and chauffeur trooped out of the Aga's villa at Le Cannet, near Cannes, and showed just what had happened in the Riviera sunshine one day last week.
Imams' lives in the material domain are subject to the same laws as other humans; they go through the same trials and tribulations as other humans, they are not immune to the tragedies and losses in life.
MSMS mentions the incident in his memoir:
"I must not close this brief record of my recent doings and experiences without some reference to an incident a good deal less agreeable than most that have lately come my way. One morning in August 1949 my wife and I left our villa near Cannes to drive to Nice airport, to catch an aircraft to Deauville. Our heavy luggage had gone on by road in our own two cars with our servants. My wife and I and her personal maid, Mile. Frieda Meyer, were therefore in a car hired from a local garage. I was beside the driver, my wife and her maid at the back. About 200 yards from the gate of our villa the mountain road takes a sharp turn and another small road comes in at the side.
As we reached the intersection we saw another car drawn up across it, so that we could neither pass nor take the by-road. Three men, masked and hooded and extremely heavily armed— they had no fewer than ten guns among the three of them— jumped out and closed in on us. One of them slashed one of our back tyres. The muzzles of their guns thrust into the car, one a few inches from my wife, another close to my chest. Fear, as one ordinarily understands it, did not bother any of us. I remember that I saw that the hands of the man who was covering me were trembling violently, and I thought with complete detachment: ''That gun is quite likely to go off." My wife's maid, as she has often told me since, thought—again quite without agitation—
"When is he going to kill the Prince?" And my wife at her side had no sensation of alarm or fear at all.
I said, in my normal tone of voice, "We won't resist, we'll give you what you want."
One of them snatched my wife's jewel box which she held in her lap. As they backed away towards their car he said, "Please be kind. Let us get away."
Then when they were just about to jump back into their car, I found my voice and my sense of humour.
"Hi, come back!" I shouted. "You've forgotten your pour-boirel"
One of them ran back and I gave him the handful of francs which I had in my pocket.
"Voila le pourboire," said I.
"Merci, merci," he said again and again, as he ran back to the other car.
We went home and telephoned the police and Lloyds. Lloyds dealt with our claim completely and generously. After almost four years had passed, six men were brought to trial in 1953, and three were convicted and sentenced. And that, I think, is all that need be said about an episode as unpleasant as—in my long experience —it was unprecedented."
facts123 wrote:
A young woman rose very pale from the baccarat table at Deauville Casino. She swayed and seemed about to faint, then her eyes fixed on a swarthy, paunchy Indian, His Highness the Aga Khan. As though impelled by hypnosis she took a step toward the Khan.
"I've just lost my last sou," she said a little huskily, "how does Your Highness always, always win?"
The Aga Khan is a descendant of the True Prophet, and a gallant gentleman. "Take this, Ma'm'selle," he said, handing her a huge oblong chip. "I make only one condition. You must never play baccarat again."
In a still more hypnotic state, Ma'm'selle moved dazedly to the cashier's window, cashed the chip for its stamped value of 100,000 francs ($4,000), and tottered out under Deauville's big moon.
Sayyed Imam Shah in the Moman Chetamni says:
Eji Ali jina chaltra samoon nav joi ae
Sri satguru ne vachane seva kari ae saar
Jem jem kalikar vadhase monivaro
Tem ali rajo chaltra karshe aapar
Cheto.....(620)
620. Do not look at what Ali does, but obey what He says, for as the times
will change, Ali's actions may be beyond your comprehension.
What do you want to prove by posting these kinds of articles. One of the rules of ismaili.net forums is no one will be allowed to insult any one from Noorani family. I request the Admin to delete this topic and ban your account.
star_munir wrote:What do you want to prove by posting these kinds of articles. One of the rules of ismaili.net forums is no one will be allowed to insult any one from Noorani family. I request the Admin to delete this topic and ban your account.
I'm personally not sure they are slanderous... just odd and very orientalising articles from, by the sound of it, the late 50s Western magazines.
I'm not sure what he intends by posting them, but it's not exactly ban-worthy, just bizarre...
Thanks for the history update. Would you like to perhaps speak in your own words rather than pasting articles without comment?
This is, after all, a discussion board, and discussion is the name of the game. What is your purpose in posting these old news reports?
I would observe it is considered inappropriate to simply spam regurgitated materials without your own commentary. So: why are you here, and what do you want to talk about (or perhaps prove?) by your mystifying but 80 years out of date 'breaking news'?
facts123 wrote:
"I'm afraid I shall never be able to accomplish anything sensational, but tackling the Alps will be a relief after the terrible strain we are feeling now. No. I won't talk politics! ."
When The Memoirs of Agakhan was published, MSMS sent a talika message that he always has two audiences in front of him; the Jamat and the Other. To the former, he is the infallible guide and the bearer of the Noor, to the latter he is a fallible ordinary human being subject to error (which is a form of a veil)....
The Imam always expresses himself according to the capacity of his audience to understand him.
There is a ginanic verse which states:
jevu taaru dil, tevi sahebjini vachaa meaning 'the Lords discourse is according to the state of your heart'.
If the heart is dark and rusty, the Imam appears accordingly. Hence to an essentially Western materialistic audience, the Imam would appear as an ordinary fallible humanbeing.
When momins disobeyed the Imam during the time of Budh Avtar, the Imam appeared as a leper and hence veiling his real nature from them.
Rumours reported in newspapers are not facts. Sometime we enjoy reading these rumours and laugh at the ignorance of their authors. Particularly on the ignorant that really take seriously everything that is written in newspapers.
Hazar Imam was asked about these once in an interview in Tajikistan almost a decade ago, he replied "Let the mad dogs bark, I have too many things to do"
In his Talika on Memoirs, just to precise, he not only said he has 2 audiences but he also precisely said the Memoirs were written for the "other" audience, not for His Jamat.
The Ismaili Muslim leader plans to privatize land and update farming.
Khorog, Tajikistan - In a remote mountain land in the heart of Asia,
all but lost to the outside world, a crowd of tens of thousands kneel
revernetly as a lone figure robed in brown passes among them.
He is the Aga Khan, one of the world's richest men and
spiritual leader of the 12 million to 15 million muslims, paying his
first visit to his followers in the isolated Pamir mountains of
Central Asia.
Tajikistan has been tormented by a civil war that broke out in
1992 after the collapse of Soviet power. For the 215,000 people -
mostly Ismailis - of this region known simply as the Pamirs, the Aga
Khan remains a saint and a prince combined. He is also a one-man
development enterprise.
During the SOviet period, the Pamir was dependent on food and
fuel sent by Moscow, and the collapse of the Soviet economy brought
the region to the brink of starvation.
The Aga Khan runs a network of small-scale, locally based
development agencies and is now setting up similar programs in the
Pamir. The plan is to make the region self-sufficient in food
production by privatizing land and introducing new agricultural
methods to this ancient culture.
During the last century, the Pamir mountains were the setting
for what historians dub the "Great Game," a land of spies and
adventurers in high Asia where Russia, China, and British India met
and where their expanding interests bumped elbows. Now this is a poor,
forgotten land.
Its people, the Ismaili Muslims, are a minority branch of the
Shiite Muslims that broke away from the Shia mainstream 1,200 years
ago, in the early periods of Islam. Most Ismailis live in the Indian
subcontinent and East Africa, though many have also settled inthe
United States, Canada, Britian and elsewhere in the West.
His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV is the 49th Imam of the
Ismailis.
In Europe, the image of the 58-year -old leader is a gossip
columnist's fantasy of legendary wealth, fine racehorses and beautiful
women, an image burnished by memories of his late father. Prince Aly
Khan, a playboy and onetime husband of American actress Rita
Hayworth. Few people in the West, however, know of the Aga Khan's work
with development agencies in Asia and Africa that are widely admired
for their small-scale, self-help approach.
When the Aga Khan flew in last month for a four-day visit to
the Pamir, landing in Khorog, the sleepy capital of Ghorno-Badakhshan
in eastern Tajikistan, the town of 30,000 emptied as residents set off
to walk to the spot where the Imam would meed his people. Most spent
the night in open, huddled under blankets.
He arrived punctually the next morning, dressed in a gleaming
white suit, and was whisked to the site in a silver Mercedes specially
imported for the occassion. Donning his robe and a tall astrakhan hat,
the Imam walked on a pathway of elegant carpets.
Addressing the throng, he urged them as Muslims to solve their
political differences peacefully. Tajikistan remains divided between
the groups that fought each other in the post-Soviet civil war. Most
Pamiris continue to oppose the Russian-backed government in the
capital, Dushanbe, and clashes between opposition fighters and
Russian-led border forces still occur in Gorno-Badakhshan.
The political tensions were emphasized by two Russian helicopter gunships that
buzzed overhead during the Aga Khan's appearance.
"Weapons should never be used again in our society," said the Ismaili
leader. "They should be replaced by constitutional rights."
The present Aga Khan's grandfather moved from Bombay, India to Europe where he
hobnobbed with royalty adn gained a reputation as a breeder of race
horces. Prince Karim, who succeeded his grandfather in 1957, runs his business
and philanthropic empire from his home in Paris.
Raised in Kenya and Switzerland, he studied Islamic History at harvard, but his
passport is British, as are those of his mother and his recently divorced
wife. He speaks English, French, Italian, Hindi-Urdu and some Arabic. He
usually travels by private jet, and his entourage bristles with satellite fax
machines and walkie-talkies.
The prince takes all this in his stride. In an interview, he said he feels no
cultural clash in crossing from Paris to Pamir.
"Not in the least," he says quietly. " I have read Nasir Khusrau," the
Ismailis' medieval poet-philosopher, who lived in Badakhshan. "I was educated
in the West, but I was educated as a Muslim."
He talks passionately about his work for the Pamiris. In remoter areas, he
says, he found "people without enough food to eat, people without sufficient
clothes for the winter - and winters here are dramatically cold."
This poverty, he emphasises, is due to the collapse of the economic system.
Asked the key to improving life in the Pamir, he replies, "First,
peace. Second, peace. Third, peace. And after that, food self-sufficiency."
In the Soviet period, this sensitive border area was well provided with
education and health care. The agricultural economy was NEGLECTED, however, and
80% of Gorno-Badakhshan's food and all its fuel came from outside the province.
Since 1993, the Aga Khan's international development network has brought in
more than 50,000 metric tons of wheat, rice, tea, fuel and other emergency
relief.
His locally-based Pamir Relief and Development Programs (PRDP) is encouraging
the inefficient Soviet-era collective farms to turn over plots of land to
private farmers. Using the same seed varieties, this step already attained a
wheat yield 12% higher than those attained under the Soviet system; potato
yields jumped 86%.
The PRDP has also introduced new high-yield wheat varieties and encouraged the
building of small irrigation channels.
"My feeling is that in eight years, these people will be self-sufficient [in
food production]," says Patrick Peterson, coordinator of rural development
programs for the Aga Khan.
"It would be much better if we had private land," says Doyor Faizov, looking at
the green shoots of wheat in fields he and a relative have leased from a
collective farm near Khorog under a PRDP project. "When people work for
themselves, they'll work night and day."
The Aga Khan's development network spends about $125 million a year on
development projects worldwide, his aides say.
Prince Karim seems only mildly perturbed that his philanthropy may be
overshadowed in the West by fascination with his lifestyle.
"I answer to my constituency. That's my priority," he says patiently. "Let the
mad dogs bark. I have too much work to do."
A picture of the Imam coming out of the helicopter and walking with
open hands towards his followers lined up to welcome him. The
followers are reciting, "Allahuma Sale Alaa Muhammadin Wa Aale Muhammad."
Another picture showing local horsemen lined up to meet Aga Khan.
There are mountains in the background. It was the Muslim leader's
first visit to his followers in the isolated region in Central
Asia.