The Ago Khan

"Every day has been so short, every hour so fleeting, every minute so filled with the life I love," wrote the Aga Khan in his autobiography three years ago, "that time for me has fled on too swift a wing." Last week swift-winged time came to an end for the legendary old Prince of Islam. In a quiet lakeside villa at Versoix, Switzerland, his huge bulk wasted to a mere 132 Ibs., His Highness Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, the Aga Khan III and spiritual leader of some 20 million Ismaili Moslems throughout the East, the Middle East and Africa, died at 79.

The old man passed away in the midst of a motley family group that included his fourth wife, a former Miss France of 1932; an English model and a French model, each of whom hope to marry one of his sons; and the seven-year-old daughter of Miss Rita Hayworth of Hollywood. His passing was proclaimed in banner headlines in the tabloid press of the great cities of the West and acknowledged with prayers in the hushed mosques of the East.

Pounds into Platinum. For more than three generations of Sunday-supplement readers, the Aga Khan was a fabulous figure who managed to combine the affluence and honors of an Oriental potentate with the predilections of a European playboy. His bland face and portly (240-odd Ibs.) figure, resembling those of a large and benevolent turtle, were constantly caught by news cameras--at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, on a fashionable beach at Cannes, at a lavish masquerade ball in Venice, or amidst panoplies of Oriental splendor as devoted followers balanced his weight in gifts of diamonds, gold or platinum on Moslem feast days. Readers of the sports page knew the Aga Khan as an ardent turfman whose stables had produced five Derby winners. (The day before his death, a thoroughbred named Damseesa, carrying his flashy red and green silks, romped home an easy 14 to 1 winner at Paris' Le Tremblay.) Gossipists eagerly followed his own progress through four marriages, and the gaudier romances of his son, Prince Aly.

Yet to millions of Moslems from the teeming cities of India to the jungle swamps of Tanganyika, the Aga Khan was a holy figure, held in unquestioning esteem. Born in Karachi of Persian parents on Nov. 2, 1877, of a line that claims direct descent from the Prophet's daughter Fatima, young Mahomed Shah became Imam of the Ismailis at the age of seven, when his father died.

A minority sect of Islam, whose origins lie deep in the feuds that rent the faithful after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, the Ismailis believe essentially that life is good and should be lived to the full. If at times their new Imam was seen in the public press to be sipping a glass of wine in contravention of the Prophet's orders, it could always be supposed that his divine powers turned the wine into water before it reached his lips, and "after all," as one of the faithful was supposed to have said, "why shouldn't a god go to Paris and race horses if he wants to?"

Throughout his life the Aga Khan's pastoral letters to his flocks were full of good, sound and fatherly advice. The ancient Moslem tradition of tossing a coin to the leprous beggar in the square was brought up to date by the Aga Khan in huge endowments to hospitals and schools.

Old into New. As Imam, the Aga Khan was a king with no temporal kingdom, a sovereign without subjects, but his inherited spiritual authority fell upon his shoulders at a time when British rule was strong in the Moslem world. Reared by a strong-minded and worldly wise mother, his Moslem training tempered by English tutors, young Mahomed learned early to reconcile the vast differences in two disparate worlds and from the beginning cast his lot and his influence in the direction of British authority. When the Germans tried to win over Islam in World War I, the Aga Khan did much to keep his followers steadfast beside the British. A grateful Britain in return heaped him with imperial honors that ran all the way from a knighthood to membership in the exclusive Jockey Club, to which no Asian had ever been admitted. They were also behind his being named President of the League of Nations in 1937. Rich beyond calculating (or telling), conscientious enough to perform the duties he was born to without stinting, eager enough to seize on the privileges that were his without questioning, the Aga Khan belonged to an age that was out of step with the newer egalitarianism. Last week, by the terms of his own will, his Imamate passed to a young man born and trained to a different kind of age.

"In view of the fundamentally altered conditions of the world," the old Aga Khan wrote in his will, "I am convinced that ... I should be succeeded by a young man who has been brought up and developed in the midst of the new age." With these words, the Imamate of the Ismailis passed over the heads of the Aga's playboy son Aly and his younger brother Sadruddin and landed on the shoulders of a sobersided young Harvard-man named Karim Khan, Prince Aly's eldest son by his first wife (an Englishwoman previously married to one of the wealthy brewery baron Guinesses).

The New Aga. "Unless he changes a great deal," says one of his former teachers of the new Aga Khan, "he'll never make a playboy." "I'm not much for sport," says Prince Karim himself. A shy, serious, 20-year-old member of Harvard's Class of '58, who shared a room during his freshman year with Adlai Stevenson's second son John Fell, Khan is a member of Harvard's exclusive Hasty Pudding Club and a straight A student who majors in Oriental history and grinds hard. "He doesn't throw his weight or his dough around," says one of his classmates. In fact, to some other Harvardmen he was just a "nice guy whose name is Cohen or Kahn or something like that."

When not in college, Kay (as he is called at Harvard) lives in London's Eaton Square with his mother, the former Joan Barbara Yarde-Buller, who, according to the late Aga, is an "Englishwoman of beauty, charm, wit and breeding." From there last week he hurried to Switzerland to his dying grandfather's bedside. Tense and nervous after the announcement of his succession, he took his seat on a white satin throne to receive a delegation of Moslem dignitaries from India, Pakistan, Singapore and East Africa. "My religious duties," he said, "start as of today."

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