Writing in 1954 in a fast decolonizing post-World War II context, Aga Khan III thus went on to elaborate what he thought to be the distinctive feature of his Ismaili community. Elaborating on the protean nature of the community, the above observation thus expatiates on his general notion of fluidity of Ismailism that we have cited in the epigraph of the ‘Introduction’ to this book. The Aga Khan further added that the system of administration sustaining this global community had also been commensurately fluid, ranging from ‘a highly developed and civilized administrative system of councils’ in ‘the British, Portuguese and French colonies of East Africa, Uganda, Portuguese East Africa, Madagascar, Natal and Cape Colony’, administering a wide gamut of educational, property, executive and judicial matters. In India, Pakistan, Burma and Malaya, a similar structure holds the community together, while in Central Asia, Afghanistan, parts of Russia and Chinese Turkestan, certain families, or sometimes even hereditary chieftains or secular rulers (but themselves Ismaili) such as in Hunza, function as the Imam's representatives and administrators connecting the myriad localities to the Imamate.

Understandably, the importance of being Imami Ismaili is premised first and foremost on the basis of a belief in the spiritual guidance of the Imam of the time drawing upon an essentially pluralized and dynamic understanding of Islam, sensitized at once to the postnational subjectivities as well as the variegated administrative structures, which stem from the global locations of the community.