Inheritance Denied
On 12 July 1957, upon the reading of the will of the Aga Khan III, Aly Khan's eldest son, Karim Aga Khan, then a junior at Harvard, was named Aga Khan IV and 49th Imam of the Ismailis. It was the first time that the descent from father to son was circumvented in the sect's 1,300-year history.
According to the Aga Khan's will, a statement of which was presented to the press by his secretary, "In view of the fundamentally altered conditions in the world in very recent years due to the great changes that have taken place, including the discoveries of atomic science, I am convinced that it is in the best interests of the Shia Muslim Ismaili community that I should be succeeded by a young man who has been brought up and developed during recent years and in the midst of the new age, and who brings a new outlook on life to his office."
Read more about this topic: Prince Aly Khan
Famous quotes containing the words inheritance and/or denied:
“Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole.... The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Tom took his whipping and went back to his seat not at all broken-hearted, for he thought it was possible that he had unknowingly upset the ink on the spelling-book himself, in some skylarking bout—he had denied it for form’s sake and because it was custom, and had stuck to the denial from principle.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)