While life with love gives meaning to our existence and protects against hodiernal adversity. All great men are lovers of humanity and mercy. They live and die serving humanity, striving for the betterment of people, struggling to preach humanism, fighting against hatred, bigotry, prejudice and ignorance. They sacrifice in performing their duty and work tirelessly to achieve their goal. In short, their love for serving humanity becomes the reason for their existence.
Certainly, Abdul Sattar Edhi was a great man, an embodiment of love, mercy, patience, hard work and humanity. Love was his religion. To serve humanity was his faith. His philosophy of life was "love human beings, serve humanity". He acted upon this philosophy throughout his life.
He started his philanthropic work from zero, setting up a small clinic in the Mithadar area of Karachi in 1951, and created one of the world's largest ambulance services . There are around 335 Edhi centres with 2,000 ambulances across the country. The foundation has given shelter to around 50,000 orphaned children and provided homes to over 20,000 unwanted and abandoned babies. Abdul Sattar Edhi is now the father of these nameless innocent children. They are no more fatherless and identity-less in our land. The foundation has around 40,000 trained nurses, who are working and serving people. The foundation has 3,500 workers and thousands of volunteers. Edhi centers are now rendering philanthropic services to the people of other countries like, America, Canada, the Middle East , Nepal, Afghanistan and many other countries of Africa. Edhi’s meritorious services have already been acknowledged across the world. In 1986, Edhi was bestowed with the Ramon Magsaysay Award for public service from the Philippines. The Guinness Book recorded the Edhi Foundation as the largest voluntary ambulance organization in the world in 2000. He was also gifted with the Balzan Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize. He was awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz by the Pakistan government. Several times he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is a measure of the politicisation of the Nobel Peace Prize, that if anyone in Pakistan had to be awarded that prize, it would be that trumped up symbol of Western propaganda, Malala Yusufzai, instead of Maulana Edhi.
In fact, Edhi is the Abou Ben Adhem of a well-known poem. Adhem earns Allah’s pleasure and love by serving humanity:
“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said
"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still, and said "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest”. (Anonymous. Submission James Henry Leigh Hunt)
After the demise of Edhi, the world is praising his selfless efforts, devotion, exemplary and missionary life.
The Washington Post writes about Edhi: “Abdul Sattar Edhi was a beacon of hope in a country too often mired in despair. He was an ascetic in a country where politicians regularly skim millions of dollars through corruption; a humanitarian in a country rife with sectarian hatred and violence; and ultimately the provider of public services in a country where the government often fails to provide even the most basic ones, like adequate hospitals and ambulances. In the course of his lifetime, he had gone from being a refugee to running Pakistan's most renowned philanthropic organization, the Edhi Foundation. Established in 1951, the foundation currently runs hospitals, orphanages, morgues, legal aid offices, centers for the abandoned and drug-addicted, and has almost 2,000 ambulances, which it dispatches to the scenes of the terrorist attacks that occur with alarming frequency across the country… Edhi's foundation had no qualms about serving Pakistan's religious minorities. Once, when he was asked why he was okay with his ambulances picking up Christians and Hindus, he snarkily replied, "Because my ambulance is more Muslim than you." Edhi was well known for his minimalist lifestyle. He reportedly had only two pairs of shalwar kameez, the billowy set of clothing commonly worn by men in Pakistan. He collected much of the operating costs for his foundation through donations from regular middle-class people. He would sit cross-legged and they would leave rupee notes near his lap. He slept in a room attached to his foundation's office for most of his life. "Social welfare was my vocation, I had to free it," he said in his autobiography, A Mirror to the Blind.
The Guardian pays tribute to Edhi in these words: “In a country increasingly riven by extremism, Abdul Sattar Edhi, the founder of a vast public welfare organisation that spans Pakistan, was a symbol of the country’s shrivelled secular tradition. Edhi, who has died aged around 90, never turned anyone away from his hospitals, homeless shelters, rehab centres and orphanages. His determination to ignore considerations of creed, cast or sect earned him the hatred of some on the country’s religious right, who accused him of being an atheist. But the public revered him for his lifelong commitment to humanity. Edhi was born in British India but moved to Pakistan six days after it was formed in August 1947. He attended some of the public speeches made by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the anglicised lawyer who led the movement for a Muslim majority state. Like many others hailing from Gujarat, Edhi found himself in Karachi, arriving by boat in the Arabian Sea entrepot that would grow into a megacity of more than 20 million people, racked by ethnic strife. Always hazy about the precise year of his birth, Edhi reckoned he was about 20 when he landed at Karachi’s stinking harbour. He initially worked as a street pedlar, hawking pencils, matches that he would hold on a tray and towels. Later he sold paan, the betel leaf and nut mixture chewed by many in the subcontinent, and then worked for his father who was a trader. But he found his time doing this unsatisfying. He said he felt an urge to do welfare work after “observing the environment I was living in, where injustice, bribery and robbery were common”. He set up his first simple pharmacy offering drugs and basic medical care, regardless of people’s ability to pay, in a tent next to his family home in Jodia bazaar. The area, now a teeming slum, is still the headquarters of the Edhi Foundation, which is run out of a ramshackle building where he lived to the end of his days in a tiny backroom....Edhi’s charitable activities expanded in 1957 when an Asian flu epidemic swept through Karachi. He borrowed money for tents to treat people who were only asked to contribute financially if they could afford it. “It was the first mass recognition of my work,” Edhi later told the journalist Steve Inskeep. A single generous donation from a businessman, a fellow member of the Memon community, allowed Edhi to buy his first ambulance, which he drove himself around the city… Through his work, Edhi met Bilquis Bano, who became his wife and a key figure in the burgeoning charity empire. They worked together during one of the toughest periods of Edhi’s life, the 1965 war between India and Pakistan which saw Karachi bombed. The couple cared for the civilian victims and organised 45 funerals, with Bilquis cleaning the bodies of women and Edhi preparing the men for burial. It was said he washed thousands of dead bodies during his life, with his foundation finding space in its graveyards for anyone who needed it. In the A Mirror to the Blind, he made clear his distaste for anyone who thought themselves too grand to touch the dead.
The Edhi Foundation ultimately became a multimillion-dollar enterprise run directly by Edhi, his wife and their four children...The foundation estimates it transports a million people to hospital each year, charging a tiny fee for the ride. In Karachi, rival gangs have been known to call temporary ceasefires to their gun battles to allow Edhi’s minimally trained ambulance staff to collect the dead and wounded. In a country with a negligible public welfare system Edhi offered cradle-to-grave services… “I have never been a very religious person,” he told the Daily Times newspaper in 2009. “I am neither against religion nor for it.” He found inspiration in socialist writers who lambasted the ruling capitalist class whom he thought were responsible for poverty in the world. And he did not see why work to alleviate suffering should be restricted to Pakistan. In 2005 the Edhi Foundation donated $100,000 to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in the US. “My religion is serving humanity and I believe that all the religions of the world have their basis in humanity,” he said.
It is also a hard fact that our cruel and corrupt ruling elite is not willing to follow the teachings and life of Abdul Sattar Edhi. Although, they have attended the funeral of this great man in the National Stadium with great respect and love, the sole purpose, according to some analysts, was to get attention of the people of Pakistan and associate themselves expediently with the saint who has earned respect and love among the people by his noble aims and commendable actions. One analyst writes, “But it is a testament to Abdul Sattar Edhi’s greatness, and to the tragedy of the country he leaves behind, that on the day of his funeral, Pakistan’s credibility-hungry politicians were lining up behind his coffin to bask in some reflected glory”.
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