Museum prepares for visit of Aga Khan
Prince to inaugurate his new centre in Don Mills on Friday
The leaf blowers and sod-edgers roared and sliced in earnest Wednesday morning outside the Aga Khan Museum, the shimmering new hub of Muslim culture perched on a berm of neatly manicured grass alongside the Don Valley Parkway.
Both outside and in, where museum staff busily primped the museum’s galleries, still not quite fully installed, amid clusters of international press being given a first glimpse, a certain urgency reigned. The museum won’t open to the public until Sept. 18, but staff and, indeed, the entire Ismaili Muslim community, had a far more pressing date on their agenda: this Friday, when the museum’s founder and namesake, Prince Karim Al Husseini Aga Khan IV, will arrive to personally and ceremonially declare the museum open.
To draw a comparison that’s still not quite equal, this is a royal visit that, for Anglophiles, would roll Queen Elizabeth, Prince William, Kate Middleton and baby George all into one. The Aga Khan, a 77-year old billionaire living north of Paris, is both the imam, or spiritual leader, of roughly 15 million Ismaili Muslims worldwide (and some 40,000 here in Ontario).
He is also a towering international force for good far beyond his religious role.
Through his agency, the Aga Khan Development Network, he employs 80,000 development workers in some of the most impoverished parts of the world. He runs schools and provides health care not just to Muslim communities, but to people of all faiths in a mission central to his core values: that education and understanding are the only pathways to a civil society.
Which brings us back to the museum, a monument to that mission of cross-fertilization and tolerance of cultural difference. The museum, director and CEO Henry S. Kim said, will help shed light on the fact that the Muslim world is vast, diverse and largely unrepresented in western culture. “The object of the collection is to highlight objects drawn from every era and every region of the Muslim world,” he said. “People need to understand that something lies between East and West, and this is the Muslim world.”
His words were echoed by Luis Monreal who, as the general manager of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, is one of his highness’s chief lieutenants.
“The museum started from a very clear strategic purpose,” he said. “In his highness’s view, education is the vector of development. Our western societies do not know the world of Islam and Muslims.” So why a museum? “A museum,” he said, “touches an emotional intelligence. Museums can have an educational impact that is direct, different from the cut and dried language of books.”
Whatever its strategic purpose, culturally, this is no token effort. The museum opens publicly next week with a pair of exhibitions: The Garden of Ideas, a show of contemporary artists from Pakistan, and In Search of the Artist, a showcase of the its permanent collection of 1,000-plus pieces spanning 1,400 years of Muslim culture stretching from Spain to Indonesia.
When it opens, this exhibition will showcase why the Aga Khan Museum will instantly become perhaps the most significant hub of Islamic culture in North America. Its collections are among the world’s best. An array of miniature manuscript paintings dating back as far as the 15th century, many of which are to be on display at opening, are perhaps the best to be found anywhere. And they’re here? Well, of course. “Canada is the global model for success for diversity and Toronto is the heart of this,” Kim says. “So from my point of view, the best question is, why not?”