Members of the Ismaili community were invited to the Ismaili Centre on Sunday to hear Mayor John Tory announce that he had bestowed a Key to the City to the Aga Khan
Half a century later, standing by the landscaped lawn of Toronto’s Ismaili Centre, Ms. Hirji could contemplate the journey that led her community to become one of Canada’s great refugee success stories.
Toronto mayor John Tory presents Prince Amyn Muhammad, the younger brother of Aga Khan IV, with a key to the city.The Ismailis, the mayor said, were part of a lineage of newcomers who had successfully built a new life in Canada, such as the Vietnamese, the Tamils and more recentlyThe honours for the Ismaili imam was “the least we could do,” Mr. Tory told the gathering, citing the extensive charities, schools and other philanthropic endeavours supported by the Aga Khan.
Behind the success story of the Ismaili refugees lay also the pain of their sudden expropriation and expulsion in Uganda, said Mahmoud Eboo, the Aga Khan Development Network representative to Canada. But the community’s prosperity also made it a scapegoat after Idi Amin took power in a coup d’état and ordered their expulsion.Bringing only what they could carry in a suitcase, Ms. Hirji’s family landed first in Britain. They moved to social housing in Newcastle and her mother took a job in a factory manufacturing silverware.