Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, the spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims around the world, has died at 88.
A statement said he died “peacefully” in Lisbon on Tuesday.
“Leaders and staff of the Aga Khan Development Network offer our condolences to the family of His Highness and to the Ismaili community worldwide,” read the statement from the network, which is a group of private aid agencies founded by the Aga Khan.
It said a designated successor will be announced later.
The death is significant for 15 million Ismailis around the world, who hold that the Aga Khan was directly descended from an unbroken line of imams going back to the Prophet Muhammad — through Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, the first imam, and his wife Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter.
Not since July 11, 1957, when Prince Shah Karim al-Husseini succeeded Aga Khan III at the age of 20, replacing his grandfather Sultan Muhammad Shah as the community’s spiritual leader, has the community experienced the death of an imam.
The title, derived from Turkish and Persian words to mean commanding chief, was originally granted in the 1830s by the emperor of Persia to Karim’s great-great-grandfather when the latter married the emperor’s daughter.
Beyond his spiritual leadership, the Aga Khan was a jet-setting millionaire — or billionaire — who enjoyed a lavish personal lifestyle and poured millions into helping people in some of the most impoverished parts of the world.
His connection to Canada was cemented when the nation, under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, took in thousands of Ismaili refugees who were abruptly expelled from Uganda in 1972.
Decades later, the Trudeau family’s friendship with the Aga Khan created an expenses scandal for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he vacationed on the leader’s private island in the Caribbean over the holidays in 2016.
On Tuesday, the younger Trudeau offered his condolences to a man he saw as an “honourary Canadian.”
“His Highness the Aga Khan was an extraordinarily compassionate global leader, a man of vision, of faith and of incredible generosity,” Trudeau said during a Lunar New Year event in Ottawa.
“He will be deeply, deeply missed by people around the world but particularly by the Ismaili community that is grieving tonight,” he continued.
“And I lost a very good friend — a friend of my father’s and a friend of mine — tonight, so I am sad and we will all reflect on his extraordinary legacy for the coming days, weeks and, indeed, years.”
Ismailis make up the second-largest Shia community in the world, living in some 35 countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, North America and Australia.