“My prayer is that the university we are now building will enable many generations of the students to acquire both knowledge and the essential spiritual wisdom needed to balance that knowledge and enable their lives to attain the highest fulfilment.”
His Highness the Aga Khan, Karachi, Pakistan
March 16, 1983
On March 16, 1983, the Aga Khan Medical College received its Charter as the Pakistan’s first private international university. In his address, His Highness the Aga Khan expressed his vision for the University:
“The Charter which His Excellency the President has been gracious enough to grant the new Aga Khan University creates the first University inspired by my family since Al-Azhar was founded in the Fatimid dynasty’s capital of Cairo in 970, a thousand years before we laid the foundation stone of the Aga Khan Medical College on this site in 1971. I can indeed hardly express the depth of my pleasure at receiving the Charter which dignifies that college with the status of a university.
My prayer is that the university we are now building will enable many generations of the students to acquire both knowledge and the essential spiritual wisdom needed to balance that knowledge and enable their lives to attain the highest fulfilment.
Although this university is new, it will draw inspiration from the great traditions of Islamic civilization and learning… At the height of this civilization, academies of higher learning reached from Spain to India, from North Africa to Afghanistan. One of the first and greatest research centres, the Bayt al-Hikmah established in Baghdad in 830, led Islam in translating philosophical and scientific works from Greek, Roman, Persian and Indian classics. By the art of translation, learning was assimilated from other civilizations. It was then advanced and furthered in new directions by scholarship in such institutions as the Dar-al-Ilm — the House of Science, which during the ninth and tenth centuries spread to many cities, through colleges like those of Al Azhar in Cairo, Qarawiyin at Fez in Morocco, Zaytuna in Tunis and the eminent Spanish centre of Cordoba, founded between 929 and 961.
Everywhere, whether in the simplest mosque schools or in universities, teaching was regarded as a mission undertaken for the service of God. Revenue from endowments provided students with stipends and no time limit was set for the acquisition of knowledge. Above all, following the guidance of the Holy Quran, there was freedom of enquiry and research. The result was a magnificent flowering of artistic and intellectual activity throughout the ummah…
It is no exaggeration to say that the original Christian universities of Latin West, at Paris, Bologna and Oxford, indeed the whole European renaissance, received a vital influx of new knowledge from Islam — an influx from which the later western colleges and universities, including those of North Africa, were to benefit in turn… Making wisdom available from one country to another is truly the finest tradition of Islamic learning.
In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation…
…the spirit of disciplined, objective enquiry is the property of no single culture, but of all humanity…let us pray that we shall develop a guiding light, a light to be added to those many others which seek to illuminate the path to a better life for the peoples of the ummah and of the Third World.”
Extracts from speech by His Highness the Aga Khan
Upon Acceptance of the Charter from the President of Pakistan, General Mohammed Zia-al-Haq,
Karachi, Pakistan, March 16, 1983
Speech published in Hikmat, July 1984, Vol II, No. IV
About the Aga Khan University
The Aga Khan University Medical College commenced operation in 1983 as an academic unit of the Faculty of Health Sciences, alongside the School of Nursing and Midwifery. AKU
Today, the University has campuses and programmes in Afghanistan, East Africa, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. Its facilities include teaching hospitals, Nursing Schools, Medical Colleges, Institutes for Educational Development, an Examination Board, and an Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations.
For more information, visit Aga Khan University, AKU at a glance
To support the institution, visit Support US
Compiled by Nimira Dewji
Ismailimail 