The 2021 award is the inaugural Karim and Rosemin Karim Prize. A Call for Nominations was made with a mid-April deadline. Ten nominations were received, of which four did not meet the Prize’s criteria.

The six successful nominations were:

• Daniel Beben and Daryoush Mohammad Poor, The First Aga Khan: Memoirs of the 46th Ismaili Imam (London: IIS / IB Tauris, 2018).

• Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018).

• Mansoor Ladha, Memoirs of a Muhindi: Fleeing East Africa for the West (Regina, SK: University of Regina Press, 2017).

• Magout, Mohammad, A Reflexive Islamic Modernity: Academic Knowledge and Religious Subjectivity in the Global Ismaili Community (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2020).

• Diana Miserez, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan: Humanitarian and Visionary (The Book Guild, 2017).

• Soumen Mukherjee, Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

All these books make important contributions to the understanding of the modern era of Ismailis. They cover developments from the 19th century to the present. Their varied approaches include the autobiographical, biographical, critical, cultural, feminist, historical, political, postcolonial, and sociological. This rich body of work is reflective of a range of kind of research that is being conducted currently on Ismailis. The founders of the Prize are gratified that they have the opportunity to profile each one of the nominations and express the hope that all of them will be read and appreciated widely.