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Old into New. As Imam, the Aga Khan was a king with no temporal kingdom, a sovereign without subjects, but his inherited spiritual authority fell upon his shoulders at a time when British rule was strong in the Moslem world. Reared by a strong-minded and worldly wise mother, his Moslem training tempered by English tutors, young Mahomed learned early to reconcile the vast differences in two disparate worlds and from the beginning cast his lot and his influence in the direction of British authority. When the Germans tried to win over Islam in World War I, the Aga Khan did much to keep his followers steadfast beside the British. A grateful Britain in return heaped him with imperial honors that ran all the way from a knighthood to membership in the exclusive Jockey Club, to which no Asian had ever been admitted. They were also behind his being named President of the League of Nations in 1937. Rich beyond calculating (or telling), conscientious enough to perform the duties he was born to without stinting, eager enough to seize on the privileges that were his without questioning, the Aga Khan belonged to an age that was out of step with the newer egalitarianism. Last week, by the terms of his own will, his Imamate passed to a young man born and trained to a different kind of age.
"In view of the fundamentally altered conditions of the world," the old Aga Khan wrote in his will, "I am convinced that ... I should be succeeded by a young man who has been brought up and developed in the midst of the new age." With these words, the Imamate of the Ismailis passed over the heads of the Aga's playboy son Aly and his younger brother Sadruddin and landed on the shoulders of a sobersided young Harvard-man named Karim Khan, Prince Aly's eldest son by his first wife (an Englishwoman previously married to one of the wealthy brewery baron Guinesses).
The New Aga. "Unless he changes a great deal," says one of his former teachers of the new Aga Khan, "he'll never make a playboy." "I'm not much for sport," says Prince Karim himself. A shy, serious, 20-year-old member of Harvard's Class of '58, who shared a room during his freshman year with Adlai Stevenson's second son John Fell, Khan is a member of Harvard's exclusive Hasty Pudding Club and a straight A student who majors in Oriental history and grinds hard. "He doesn't throw his weight or his dough around," says one of his classmates. In fact, to some other Harvardmen he was just a "nice guy whose name is Cohen or Kahn or something like that."
When not in college, Kay (as he is called at Harvard) lives in London's Eaton Square with his mother, the former Joan Barbara Yarde-Buller, who, according to the late Aga, is an "Englishwoman of beauty, charm, wit and breeding." From there last week he hurried to Switzerland to his dying grandfather's bedside. Tense and nervous after the announcement of his succession, he took his seat on a white satin throne to receive a delegation of Moslem dignitaries from India, Pakistan, Singapore and East Africa. "My religious duties," he said, "start as of today."