Speech - H.H. The Aga Khan IV at M.I.T.

AGA KHAN IV: President Vest, members of the Corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, distinguished members of the faculty, Mayor Reeves, happy graduates, even happier parents, and others gathered here today-- I am pleased and honored to be with you this morning. MIT has shown a standard of excellence in education and research that sets a benchmark for universities everywhere. You who've been at the Institute for years may be excused if you take this in stride. But for me, coming here for the first time in several years, the energy of the place is palpable.

Actually, my reaction is somewhat personal. When, as a young man, I began to think about colleges, MIT was my first choice. In the end, I acceded to the advice of my grandfather, who favored Harvard.

[LAUGHTER]

In fact, I didn't even apply anywhere other than MIT. And MIT accepted me on the basis of my grades. They didn't even ask me to take an examination, which is good. Because I could hardly understand written English. When my grandfather told me I shouldn't enroll here, I was devastated. That really put the kibosh on my plans to study science. You see, I learned Harvard English.

[LAUGHTER]

Education has been important to my family for a long time. My forefathers founded Al-Azhar University in Cairo some 1,000 years ago at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders as an embodiment of religious faith and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the creator's physical world. The form of universities has changed over those 1,000 years. But that reciprocity between faith and knowledge remains a source of strength.

MIT has changed also over its 130 years. This university was initially designed to meet the needs of society in a newly industrialized world. As the world and its needs evolved, so has MIT's curriculum. Steadily, the emphasis on social sciences and humanities has expanded as the Institute has recognized increasingly that the range of technologies that are needed to solve societal problems goes far beyond those of engineering and natural sciences.

The increased richness of education results in an increasingly versatile set of graduates. As I look out over those today who are here, I see that MIT has changed in other ways. The great continents of the world are now represented in your student body and in your faculty. So, too, are the great religions of the world. MIT seems prepared to take advantage of excellence from all quarters, a fact that is sure to reinforce the Institute's future strength.

When I was thinking about the theme that I should choose for this talk, I considered first that commencements are occasions to reflect on general truths-- truths that will retain their validity over the course of your lives and over the wide range of intellectual interests that you graduates embody. But how is that search for generality to be squared with the very particular point in time that today represents? You and I are here, in a real sense, only because 1994 finds MIT and the world at distinctive stages of their evolution. Still, the particular can provide insight into the general. So my comments today will draw on the particular in the hope of saying something of value about the general.

I shall talk today about encounters. Encounters. When two people meet, or two particles, or two cultures, in that crucial moment of interaction, the results of an encounter are determined. In the simplest of encounters-- say, with two billiard balls-- the outcome is a predictable result of position, velocity, and mass.

But the encounters that interest me most are not so simple. In the encounters of people and cultures, much depends on the path that each has taken to that point. These are not stochastic processes. The su

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