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He began work as a
street hawker, selling pencils and matchboxes in Karachi. In 1951, he
set up a small dispensary in Mithadar. Since then he has not only spread
a network of social services across the length and breadth of Pakistan
but has extended them beyond the boundaries of his country. The system
he has established is a model for a welfare state that he hopes will one
day be adopted by the Third World.
Below, in his own
words, is an excerpt from the seminal work on Abdul Sattar Edhi, called
Edhi - an Autobiography, A Mirror to the Blind written by Tehmina
Durrani. Ms. Durrani spent two years accompanying Edhi on his rounds and
in his daily life:
"I had accepted at
the outset that charity was distorted and completely unrelated to its
original concept. Reverting to the ideal was like diverting an ocean of
wild waters. Another major obstacle in the promotion of welfare was
exposed...the disgust of man towards mankind. There was only one
expression, one reaction from everyone...cringing.
"From the
grimacing faces of my colleagues I understood that I was the only one
not disgusted. They washed their hands vigorously, smelt their clothes
repeatedly and complained incessantly of the stench having seeped under
their skins. Then they rushed home to bathe, scrubbed their clothes and
disinfected them, sometimes gave them away saying, 'the very weave was
stricken'. There was nowhere to go with this attitude. We could not
reduce suffering unless we rose above our own senses...cringing was the
first and the greatest hindrance that blocked our way, the most brutal,
but also the most understandable.
"I began at
Mithadar and brought back bloated, drowned bodies from the sea. Black
bodies that crumbled with one touch. I picked them up from rivers, from
inside wells, from roadsides, accident sites and hospitals. I picked
them up from manholes and gutters, from under bridges, from railway
bogies, from tracks, water sheds and drains. When families forsook them
and authorities threw them away, I picked them up and brought them home,
to my work force, spreading the stench in the air forever.
"Many years had
passed raising questions and searching for answers. When the anxiety at
the vastness of the areas I must cover overwhelmed me, I took courage
from the Prophet Muhammad's (PBUH) example. He was confronted with
enormous opposition and more hypocrites than friends. Contemplating
this, I reached back to Islam and began to examine the shambles it lay
in and at last I found the core, the predominant factor crucial to
social development
"Islam instructed
a way of life that emphasised the essential qualities of self-help and
compassion, it instructed all the crucial attitudes that I had
discovered as solutions and all were missing in application. Islam was a
complete programme for human uplift, but its instructions were either
unheeded or distorted, meanings and interpretations were usurped,
self-help and labour considered shameful, its I people strayed like lost
sheep.
"Diagnosing the
beginning accurately, inevitably led to the correct solution. The
distance between preaching and practicing removed, the two were one. I
would have to interpret the message with the way I lived my life, that
for this purpose I did not need to be a scholar was a revelation.
Islamic simplicity enveloped all its jurisdictions under one rubric,
humanitarianism, and all religions did the same.
Looking back after a
lifetime of dedicated social work:
"I sat on the
footpath outside my Mithadar office. At the same spot where forty years
ago, after my mother's death, I had put down my bundle of belongings and
observed the 14-foot wide unpaved alley, that crossed over at both ends
of the street...
"But 65 years had
whitened the hair on my head and beard and in the building behind me
everything had been transformed. The eight foot square dispensary I had
bought in 1951 had extended to cover the second and third floors. From
it I had stretched out to reach those who could not reach me, spreading
a network that crept like a web at the grass roots level, covering the
length and breadth of Pakistan."
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