His Highness the Aga Khan IV, 1936-2025

A statement from Dean Hashim Sarkis

It is with profound sadness that we mark the passing on February 4 of His Highness Karim Aga Khan IV—a visionary leader, extraordinary philanthropist, and unwavering supporter of MIT and the School of Architecture and Planning. 

It is impossible to overestimate the Aga Khan’s impact as a major force for good, especially in developing countries and regions, since assuming his hereditary leadership role in 1957. His humanitarian work, as founder and chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network, promoted life-changing initiatives in education, health, culture, and economic development around the world, with a focus on the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The wide-ranging array of AKDN specialty agencies work strategically and collaboratively to alleviate poverty, improve the status of women, and celebrate Islamic art and architecture, among other top goals.

The positive influence of His Highness on architecture and urbanism cannot be exaggerated. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, created in 1977 as part of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, is the largest architecture award in the world. Along with other MIT faculty over the years, I am honored to serve on its steering committee, which organizes every three years to select recipients’ outstanding works in historic preservation, planning, and landscape architecture.

At MIT, where he presented the Commencement address in 1994, the Aga Khan has been a longtime supporter of research and teaching on the Muslim world. The MIT Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA), the leading international graduate program in the field, was established in 1979 through a generous endowment from His Highness. AKPIA continues to nurture the world’s most respected researchers and educators in the history, theory, and criticism of Islamic architecture and urbanism. As part of the MIT Libraries, the Aga Khan Documentation Center and its renowned Archnet collection of visual and text materials supports scholarship and teaching near and far.   

His Highness’s passion for buildings, his spatial thinking and synthetic approach to problems, his love of stone, geometry, light, trees, detail—but also how he viewed architecture as transformative of our lives and societies—will be missed. We offer our deepest condolences to his family and community, with lasting gratitude for his humanitarian leadership and philanthropy.

A statement from Professor Nasser Rabbat, director of the MIT Aga Khan Program

It is with heavy heart that I write with the sad news of the passing today of His Highness Karim Aga Khan IV.  

His Highness was, in my opinion, the most strategic and generous philanthropist in the Islamic world. His AKDN network of organizations working on various aspects of development in the Islamic world is second to none. His AKTC, the Trust for Culture, runs a number of excellent programs that have affected the cultural expression in the Islamic world on many fronts: architecture, through the Aga Khan Award for Architecture; music, through the Aga Khan Music Award; and heritage conservation, through the Aga Khan Historic Cities Program.

He was also the visionary donor who endowed the Aga Khan Program for Islamic architecture at Harvard University and MIT. We are all beneficiaries of his generosity and farsightedness, as AKPIA has become the leading program in the world for the study of Islamic art, architecture, and urbanism. His insistence in the late 1970s on designing an integral program has allowed us to grow and thrive and adapt to the changes in the world of scholarship and research for the last half century. He had judiciously nurtured the growth of AKPIA by endowing a position at the GSD and by supporting Archnet at MIT, among many other gestures of generosity and planning. We are indebted to him.

Personally, I had the honor to know him since 1984 as a graduate student here, then as an Aga Khan Professor. He was very keen to visit the program regularly, to check with the students on AKPIA scholarships and on the wellbeing of the program. Our relationship was strengthened after I became the Aga Khan Professor and met with him occasionally to take part in one or the other of his educational and heritage initiatives. He was always a gentleman’s gentleman: polite to a fault, patient, an incredible listener, and a generous host. Being with him was always a cherished opportunity, and I will miss his presence and visionary thinking dearly.

On behalf of our AKPIA community, I send our condolences to His Highness’s family, his community, and all those who were touched by his exceptionally generous life.