From My Notebook — Is Man Deified in the Twentieth Century?

After a silence imposed by the double responsibility of teaching and writing, the thinker Rose Ghorayeb has favored her magazine, The Woman's Voice, with a series of critical studies and sketches plucked from the very heart of our life, which we shall publish in succession, beginning today with this installment — a treatment, as we see, of a subject that may well have occurred to many of us, though no one has dared to broach it.

For weeks now the newspapers, the magazines, and the broadcasting stations have been raining down on us news of the Aga Khan: news of his death, his will, the ceremony of his burial, the grandson he left to succeed him, and the like.

What I remember of this Aga Khan from what the papers have published is that he spent his life moving about among the capitals of Europe. At one time I would see his picture with his French wife, at another with his other wife (the Begum), on the occasion of the police recovering her stolen jewels, valued at millions of liras. And I remember that his Ismaili sect, spread through India, Pakistan, and Syria, used to present him every so often with the equivalent of his weight in gold or diamonds or platinum or other precious stones and metals. Perhaps that is why he took such care to keep up his heavy weight. Thanks to this mad generosity on the part of the members of his sect, the Aga Khan was able to move among the capitals of Western Europe, to become one of the greatest men of wealth on earth, to multiply his fortune by breeding racehorses and by carrying on other kinds of trade, and to live with his sons and his wives a life of luxury and extravagance — his son Aly Khan marrying Rita Hayworth and then divorcing her, after spending on her sums past all counting.

All this and more the papers described at their leisure. But there are questions about this Aga Khan that still haunt my mind, and I find no allusion to them, and no answer to them, in the papers. For example: How is it right for a spiritual leader whom his followers count a god or half a god to reside in Europe while his flock resides in Asia? How is it right for him to live a life of luxury, indulgence, and gambling? And what benefit do these believers reap from this leader in return for the enormous sums they lavish upon him? True, he willed seven hundred and fifty thousand Syrian liras to their poor — but what is that amount beside the precious stones and metals that were carried to him in heaps?

And then — there still exist, in the twentieth century and in civilized countries, communities that deify a man and shower him with gifts and with money gathered from their poor and their rich alike. And in countries economically backward, whose people need every piaster their lands produce, and in circles that suffer from social inequality and where the rate of poverty rises to a fearful height, there are still people who transfer their money by the millions to a man living in the capitals of Europe the life kings lived in their golden ages.

And despite all this — no voice of complaint or protest rises from the members of his sect. Not one of the newspapermen who publish his publicity dares to send forth a word of wonder or disapproval. Not one of them attempts to address these people, to stir their thinking and move them to examine their religious rites and their inherited traditions. Nor is there among them anyone to ask the thinkers of the sect: Is it decreed that you be enslaved to your past and your traditions, even when they violate the simplest rules of logic and bring down upon you the heaviest losses?

Who, I wonder, will give us a ruling on this subject?