Saturday 29 / June / 2024
Muscat: Abdul Sattar Edhi, one of the world’s leading philanthropists, has died. He was 88.
He started the Edhi Foundation, Pakistan’s largest welfare organisation — which supports the destitute—with an initial sum of a mere five thousand rupees.
However, because of Edhi’s noble work, which people started taking note of, he began receiving bigger donations, which allowed him to expand his services.
Edhi was widely regarded as a guardian of the poor and reportedly never kept more than two pairs of clothes and worn-out shoes for himself, not because he could not afford better ones, but because he chose to wear what the majority of people he served wore.
Dubbed as the ‘Angel of Mercy’ and ‘Pakistan’s Mother Teresa,’ he started his first clinic in 1951 and his foundation has saved thousands of abandoned or orphaned new born babies, provided shelter and healthcare to numerous homeless people and opened rehab centres for the elderly, drug addicts and the mentally ill.
Edhi dedicated his life to aiding the poor and destitute, and had, over the last six decades, almost single-handedly improved welfare in Pakistan. His agency ran relief operations in Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus region and the United States.
Besides running schools and a large network of ambulances in Pakistan, the foundation also runs almost 400 welfare centres in rural and urban Pakistan, which operate as food kitchens, rehabilitation homes for the elderly, shelters for abandoned women and children and clinics for the mentally handicapped.
Despite running a huge charitable organisation, Edhi could often be seen begging on the roads to fund his organisation. He lived in a small two-bedroom apartment above his clinic in Karachi.
Together with his wife, Bilquis Edhi, he received the 1986 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service. He is also the recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize and the Balzan Prize. In September 2010, Edhi was also awarded an honorary degree by the University of Bedfordshire.
He was diagnosed with kidney failure in 2013 and remained on dialysis. He also refused an offer for treatment abroad from former president Asif Ali Zardari, and said he wanted to be treated at a government hospital in Pakistan instead.
Thousands flocked to the National Stadium in Karachi on Saturday for his funeral, which was held in the presence of an army guard of honour.
His foundation served all the needy, irrespective of their religion, caste or ethnical background.
He once said, “My religion is humanitarianism, which is the basis of every religion in the world.”
“He will be remembered as an angel, which he obviously was, and he showed that to us through his beautiful actions, his loss is too big for humanity and there might never be another Edhi again. We only pray that his son Faisal Edhi takes the organisation forward with the same passion as his father. May his soul be blessed,” said Huzaifa Ubaid Khan, a resident of Oman.
