February 2010 • Reference Page
Reference Page: February 2010
By Suzanne LaBarre & Claire Levenson
Posted February 17, 2010
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Spirit of Community
To architects, he’s the namesake of a prestigious award and the man behind the Islamic world’s largest private-development network—the only charitable organization that bothered putting a five-star hotel in Afghanistan. But who is the Aga Khan exactly? Descended from the Prophet Muhammad, he’s the spiritual leader of millions of Ismaili Muslims, who tithe a percentage of their income to Swiss bank accounts associated with the Aga Khan. We assume the funds support his charity, which deals in everything from affordable housing to microfinancing. Do they also support his penchant for Teutonic socialites?
To architects, he’s the namesake of a prestigious award and the man behind the Islamic world’s largest private-development network—the only charitable organization that bothered putting a five-star hotel in Afghanistan. But who is the Aga Khan exactly? Descended from the Prophet Muhammad, he’s the spiritual leader of millions of Ismaili Muslims, who tithe a percentage of their income to Swiss bank accounts associated with the Aga Khan. We assume the funds support his charity, which deals in everything from affordable housing to microfinancing. Do they also support his penchant for Teutonic socialites?
Forget Me Not
Like all nonofficial commemorations of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the Hu Huishan Memorial became instantly controversial . The architect, Liu Jiakun, had carefully avoided making a direct political statement, but local authorities threatened to close his building anyway. For parents who requested investigations into the collapse of the region’s schools, the first anniversary of their children’s deaths was even more harrowing. Many were sent to jail for up to three weeks and threatened with longer sentences if they dared to stage memorials. Meanwhile, President Hu Jintao turned the earthquake’s first anniversary into a series of photo ops, in which he can be seen shaking hands with smiling survivors.
Like all nonofficial commemorations of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the Hu Huishan Memorial became instantly controversial . The architect, Liu Jiakun, had carefully avoided making a direct political statement, but local authorities threatened to close his building anyway. For parents who requested investigations into the collapse of the region’s schools, the first anniversary of their children’s deaths was even more harrowing. Many were sent to jail for up to three weeks and threatened with longer sentences if they dared to stage memorials. Meanwhile, President Hu Jintao turned the earthquake’s first anniversary into a series of photo ops, in which he can be seen shaking hands with smiling survivors.
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