Education and Culture Programme of Aga Khan Trust for Culture

The Education and Culture Programme of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture includes The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA), which is an endowed centre of excellence in the history, theory, and practice of Islamic architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; ArchNet.org, an extensive on-line resource focusing on architecture, urban design, urban development, and related issues in the Muslim world; the Music Initiative in Central Asia; and the Humanities Project in Central Asia.

Objectives

In contrast to the other two programmes of the Trust, the Education and Culture Programme is primarily focused on academics and academic institutions. Its resources are the Trust's archive, the research, resources, publications, faculty, and students of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Trust's contacts with architectural educators and scholars in related fields around the world. Increasingly, the Trust is seeking to disseminate the knowledge and experience accumulated by AKPIA and by the Trust's owns initiatives. Advances in technology and communication have made the flow of information and dialogue easier. The hope is that the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the professional staff and resources of the Trust will act as vehicles to stimulate and enhance discourse at other institutions. The Trust believes that a borderless network of institutions contributing to, and learning from each other, can have considerable influence in the way that architectural professionals are educated, can educate others, and will pursue their practices.

The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture

The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) was established in 1977 and has the status of being both a Trust grantee and a major resource for its work in Education and Culture. An endowed centre of excellence in the history, theory, and practice of Islamic architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AKPIA's mandate is to educate architects, planners, teachers, and researchers who can contribute directly to meeting the building and design needs of Muslim communities today. AKPIA teaching and scholarship also serves to increase sympathetic cross-cultural interest in Islamic arts and culture. To date, more than 120 professionals from throughout the Muslim world have graduated from the Program. Trust endowments have supported the operation of Harvard's textual and visual collections on the history of Islamic art and architecture, and have enabled the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop an outstanding visual and reference collection on the architecture of the 20th century Muslim world. The Trust has also underwritten the publication of Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, produced since 1983 through AKPIA's office at Harvard University, and published by Brill, Leiden, the Netherlands. For more information, please visit the AKPIA website. The AKPIA brochure is also available on-line.

In 1999, the Trust further augmented the resource available to AKPIA by establishing an endowed chair for the Aga Khan Professorship of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Islamic Societies at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. This chair, it is hoped, will enable the school to provide leadership and greater focus in both historic and contemporary aspects of public spaces in Islamic societies.

ArchNet is on-line resource based at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning with the support of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. The central goal of ArchNet is to provide an extensive, high-quality, globally accessible, on-line resource focusing on architecture, urban design, urban development, and related issues in the Muslim world. It is available through the Internet, at www.archnet.org, to scholars, practitioners, and interested non-specialists.

New computer and telecommunication technologies have great potential for supporting communication and collaboration among architectural and planning students, faculty, scholars, and practitioners throughout the world. ArchNet will provide opportunities for realising that potential. ArchNet will be carried out under the overall direction of William Mitchell, Dean of the School of Planning and Architecture at MIT and will draw heavily upon the resources of AKPIA and the Trust.

ArchNet will provide an extensive, high-quality, globally accessible, intellectual resource focused on architecture and planning issues and would include restoration, conservation, housing, landscape, and related concerns. It is to be achieved by providing on an accessible server, images, Geographic Information System and Computer Aided Design databases, a searchable text library, bibliographical reference databases, on-line lectures, curricular materials, papers, essays, and reviews, discussion forums and statistical information on an accessible server maintained by the MIT Press. The structure will be designed to offer each user a personal workspace tailored to his or her individual needs. From this space, they will be able to contribute their own findings and research to the larger site. The Website will aim to foster close ties between institutions and between users. Through the use of on-line forums, chat rooms, and debates, it is hoped that the site can encourage and promote discussions amongst participants. ArchNet will be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. It will be a bottom-up system, in which information will eventually flow directly from the user to a continually expanding database that can be shared by all. The system will be designed to promote ready intercommunication and maintenance of an international scholarly community of ArchNet members.

This resource will be developed and sustained in a decentralised fashion at sites distributed throughout the world. High priority will be given to providing good access in locations where the need is particularly pressing due to lack of traditional library resources and poor terrestrial telecommunications infrastructure. The most important component of the proposal involves the selection of partner institutions in the Islamic world to generate, share, and exchange information. In its infancy, ArchNet will rely on the AKPIA and the Trust to provide the initial content. However, as ArchNet matures and gains greater membership, the aim is to have the content generated through member interaction and exchange, as well as through the research, holdings, and studios of the partner institutions. The current list of participating institutions includes:

ArchNet also hopes to collaborate with research institutions, professional organisations, and professional practices in order to bring together the widest range of expertise, knowledge, and resources.

Aga Khan Humanities Project in Central Asia

The Trust also administers an innovative project started two years ago in Tajikistan, Central Asia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Aga Khan Humanities Project aims to develop a core, introductory humanities curriculum for use in universities in Central Asia based on the cultural traditions of the region. Cultural revival can help locate the identity of the citizens of Central Asia in their cultural heritage, with an appreciation of the breadth of this heritage. The Project therefore employs a concept of civilisation that encompasses societies, religious communities, status groups or ethnic groups, and hopes to shed light on their interaction. Central Asia is a product of many civilisations, including ancient Iranian, Greek, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Turkic, Islamic, Jewish, and Russian. The Project will focus on the development of skills of thinking, and employs the notion of civilisation as an orientating principle rather than a narrowly defined concept. This notion of civilisation will not be essentialist, and will respect the layering and the diversity of civilisations both within each layer and within each individual. For example, Islamic Civilisation is an interactive plurality that encompasses the inner life as exemplified by Sufism, the rational as exemplified by the philosophers and scientists, the legal, as exemplified by the Shari'ah, and the artistic and literary, as exemplified by adab, the oral tradition, and art and architecture.

This Project will therefore not promote any one perspective nor provide religious instruction. Embodying a comparative perspective, the curriculum will orient students to cultural pluralism and the foundations of civil society in a variety of cultures. It will assume that one measure of the cultural resilience of a people is their ability to recognise greatness in other cultures. Such perspectives should help students address current challenges, predicaments and opportunities and build bridges across communal boundaries in the region. The Project will also help make Central Asian culture available to the outside world. This endeavour could help Central Asians return to their historical role as creative mediators at the crossroads of civilisations, offering a banner under which both the yearning for national identity and a universalistic concern for all humanity can thrive.

The pedagogic approach is based on skills of thinking that are vital to Central Asia as the region undergoes a reconstitution of its economics, politics, and culture. In a situation of fundamental, rapid and dramatic change, the greatest gift from one generation to the next is to transfer the ability to face new problems. It aims to accomplish this by developing skills in ethical reflection, cultural interpretation and aesthetic appreciation. The pedagogy focuses on teamwork and problem solving. The skills include the ability to ask questions that go deeper than information seeking and to be objective about the greatness and weaknesses of the distant and the recent past. These skills include:

The pedagogy is designed to encourage attitudes of openness to, and curiosity about, other peoples, tolerance of diversity in opinion and tradition, and finally, the recognition that human growth involves the cultivation of both reason and the imagination.