Abdul Sattar Edhi succeeded in raising his multi-dimensional personality to such heights that most of the commentators, including the present one, are having difficulty in capturing it in its full glory in a single piece of writing. The best course available to them is to focus on an aspect of Edhi’s life and work that touched them most deeply.

While recalling his seven-minute encounter with Edhi, when he had gone to present him with the Eqbal Ahmed Award, Naeem Sadiq concentrates on his lack of enthusiasm for celebrating the awards he received and his desire not to be diverted from his duty to all those who needed succour. We learn of one of Edhi’s strong points.

Zubeida Mustafa, who herself belongs to the Abdul Sattar Edhi-Adeeb Rizvi brotherhood of servants of the poor, has offered six reasons that won Edhi the people’s love and trust and all the six reasons stem from Edhi’s total identification with the poor -- living like them and in their midst, working like them as the first among equals, and choosing to be treated at an institute that respects the poor’s rights. Here we find the portrait of Edhi he himself treasured the most.

Many people want him canonised as a saint because they apparently think no simple human being could have done all that Edhi was able to do. This approach will undermine ordinary citizens’ confidence in their ability to serve their fellow beings.

There is no question about Edhi’s greatness in winning worldwide respect for his complete commitment to the welfare of the sick and the needy and his integrity. And this in a country high on the list of corrupt nations and while working in an area - charity - in which honesty is at a discount in Pakistan.

Countless are instances of people rushing towards Edhi to help him serve humanity. A woman arrives unannounced in a rickshaw, makes a donation of half a million rupees, and disappears without disclosing her name. A man offers Edhi two large bungalows he has built in Karachi. A foreign government gives him helicopters and a Pakistan government gives him a small plane. Thousands of examples are available to confirm people’s faith not only in Edhi’s honesty but also, and more importantly, in his capacity to guarantee proper and efficient use of the funds entrusted to him.

Edhi became a legend in his lifetime; a legend liked all the more for being transparent. He told the whole story of his life, his struggles and his heartbreaks, of the good turns the kind-hearted people did to him and of the many attempts made by his detractors to defame him and scare his donors away. The most heart-warming part of his narrative is Edhi’s dream of building a network of hospitals across the country.

The legend was also sustained by Edhi’s ability to be the first to arrive at the sites of disaster not only within his own country but also beyond its boundaries. A spell in an Israeli prison did not deter him from extending relief to the Palestinian victims of an unjust war.

Edhi also won respect for his truthfulness. He admitted his mistake in taking a second wife and thus hurting Bilquis and he conceded his mistake in dabbling in politics. But his frequent statements that he was a non-political person were true only to the extent that he did not belong to any political party. Otherwise, he did not decline General Zia’s invitation to join his Majlis-i-Shura and did attend its meetings despite being convinced that the general was exploiting and abusing Islam for political / personal ends. Fortunately for him he resigned from the assembly soon after joining it.

But Edhi did political work all his life, especially by relieving the state and the community of their responsibility for giving the people the cover of social welfare. How can you describe as non-political a person who treats the sick and provides shelter to the homeless and tells each head of government who meets him to concentrate on the state’s social welfare obligations? It is impossible to treat as non-political a man who declared his adherence to socialist ideals and often discussed socialism with a son who had studied in the United States. Edhi’s disclaimers in this regard only betray his desire not to be counted with self-seekers parading themselves as politicians in this country.

Trying to assess Edhi’s greatness by the amount of work done by him will demand much sure space than is available at the moment. Another, and perhaps better, way to know the real Edhi is to appreciate his philosophy of public service. He sometimes described himself as a social reformer and this is what he essentially was. The key to his character lay in his belief in the dignity of human person and the right to life of all human beings regardless of one’s faith, gender, domicile or social status.

It was his belief in human dignity and its survival after death that Edhi took care of unclaimed bodies. He would keep bodies in a cold morgue so that they did not decompose and he would lovingly wash mutilated, disfigured bodies because respect for the dead led him to respect and love for the living. He created a large band of workers for rushing victims of accidents, violence and disasters to hospitals as quickly as possible because he believed in the latter’s right to life and their fellow beings’ duty to help them.

As a social reformer he promoted ideas of progressive change through action and not by preaching alone. For example:

- Edhi often spoke of the rights’ of women and of the need to mobilise them in various fields of activity. By advancing the role of Bilquis Edhi as his partner in his mission he promoted the ideal of respect for women and gender equality. When he had finished telling his life story to one of his biographers he asked the latter to listen to Bilquis Edhi’s story as that would complete the account of their indivisible lives.

- Edhi rejected the cruel treatment of babies born out of wedlock. Not only that he did not attach any blame to such infants, he did not consider it necessary to denounce the natural parents either. He simply called the babies children born of love and had palnas ople to put the unwanted newborns in these cradles instead of throwing them on heaps of rubbish or depositing them near mosques out of their faith in the goodness of the pious ones. Simply by initiating this scheme Edhi not only saved many lives, he also made a decisive assault on a social evil which most people still dare not condemn by words even.

- Perhaps Edhi’s most outstanding achievement is that he lifted the concept of serving the poor from a charitable undertaking to one of the community’s foremost obligations. In a way he put the rulers and policymakers to shame -- for neglecting their duty to the citizens, especially the poor. Perhaps that is the reason attempts are being made by men in authority to paint Edhi in their own images.

The challenge Edhi has left for his successors is that they will continue his mission as a movement for social reform and not merely as a charity.