Aga Khan IV
23rd August 2018
"We celebrate today a beautiful new architectural accomplishment. As we do so, we also honor those who have made this Centre possible - and the values that have inspired their work.Two of those values which deserve special mention today - the value of education as a force for cooperation and healing in our world - and the value of architecture as a source of inspiration and illumination."
15th September 2015
"... It was expected that newly independent countries would be able to make huge economic and diplomatic choices between capitalism, socialism, alignment and non-alignment, even while they were fashioning new frameworks of governance. But it was a tough assignment. Often, when old autocratic orders yielded, new democratic orders were not ready to thrive or were walled in by political and ideological dogmas ... ."
10th March 2014
"More information at our fingertips can mean more knowledge and understanding. But it can also mean more fleeting attention-spans, more impulsive judgments, and more dependence on superficial snapshots of events. Communicating more often and more easily can bring people closer together, but it can also tempt us to live more of our lives inside smaller information bubbles, in more intense but often more isolated groupings."
27th February 2014
"I will comment, as a faith leader, on the crisis of governance in so much of the world today, before concluding with some thoughts about the values that can assist countries of crisis to develop into countries of opportunity, and how Canada can help shape that process."
13th January 2012
"There are many topics of mutual interest that I could talk about today. But I have picked just one. In my eyes it is important – and I understand that it is also high among your priorities. I refer to the field of governance and public policy, and, specifically, to the difficulty of establishing workable constitutional systems – especially in countries with less experience in democratic governance."
18th March 2010
"What did we hope and predict for the Group 50 years ago? We certainly aspired for its transformation from a loss making infant enterprise to a profitable blue chip corporation, and then its transformation from a private venture into a public company - owned principally today by many thousands of local shareholders. We also worked to stay ahead on the technology front, determined not to burden Africa with outmoded production techniques."
9th June 2009
"Over these past five decades, much of my attention has been focused on the challenges of the developing world, and it is in this arena that our partnership with the University of Alberta has been most active. The University’s commitment to the global context and the developing world has been inspiring, and the match between your areas of expertise and developing world requirements, as I understand them, has been nothing short of extraordinary."
8th May 2009
"I visited numerous countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East and I came into contact with men and women who were intelligent, mature, responsible and who were seeking to build nation states – nation states which would be autonomous, which would be well governed, whose economies would be competent, but these builders were seeking to build on the basis of an enormous knowledge deficit."
18th April 2008
I would also like to quote an infinitely more powerful statement about the unity of mankind, because it comes directly from the Holy Quran, and which I would ask you to think about. The Holy Quran addresses itself not only to Muslims, but to the entirety of the human race, when it says:
“O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord Who created you from one single soul and from it created its mate and from them twain hath spread abroad a multitude of men and women.”
17th October 2007
"I believe that today the Islamic world’s view of its own future is seriously affected by a divergent squint. It is a world split into two tendencies: on the one hand, modernisers and believers in progressive change, on the other, traditionalists who might even be described as hidebound."