Love in the time of war

There are two kinds of virtues, the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. The former are the skills that one brings to a job interview. The latter are talked about at one's funeral - whether you were kind, brave, honest and faithful. Were you capable of deep love? 

Pakistan's Abdul Sattar Edhi, the humanitarian, had the eulogy virtues. A slight and courteous man with unfashionable spectacles, alternating between his two sets of clothes, he was no one to notice on the street. Yet over six decades, ever since he opened his first clinic and a one-man ambulance service in Karachi in 1951, after the death of his mother, his selflessness held international attention. His family had migrated from the Indian state of Gujarat to the newly created Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947. 

He never finished school. The world of suffering became his tutor. "Social welfare was my vocation, I had to free it," he said in his autobiography, A Mirror to the Blind. He worried that social progress had not matched the world's material and technological advances. "People have become educated," he said, "but have yet to become human."

Today his organisation, the Edhi Foundation, is a relied-upon social safety net running a nationwide network of ambulances, 24-hour emergency services, orphanages, women's shelters, blood banks, soup kitchens and homes for abandoned infants. It also provides technical education to the disadvantaged, religious education for street children, consultation on family planning and maternity services, as well as free legal aid, financial and medical support to prisoners and the handicapped. 

The Edhi foundation has provided aid in every international emergency from the civil war in Lebanon to the United States after Hurricane Katrina. And at home, he personally drove one of his ambulances and showed up to transport the injured or wash the dead until his health no longer allowed it. "When my ambulance takes a wounded person who is in pain to the hospital, when people reach the hospital, I find peace in knowing I helped an injured person who was in pain," he told Reuters in an interview in 2013. To Edhi, who that person was did not matter. He saw charity as a central tenet of his faith. As he memorably put it, "Humanitarian work loses its significance when you discriminate between the needy."

Revered by many as Maulana Edhi, he passed away at the age of 88 on Friday night, after being ill for several years followed by a kidney failure. In June, he declined an offer by former president Asif Ali Zardari for treatment abroad, insisting on getting it done in Pakistan, particularly in a government hospital. 

A famously ascetic figure, Edhi had no desire for worldly belongings. He slept in a sparsely equipped room in Karachi, often listening to recordings of verses from the Holy Quran on a battered, old tape recorder. He never bought a house for his children. His initial office was tiny; he would often sleep outside it, in case people needed help at night. 

His devotion earned him numerous awards at home and abroad. He was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times, according to The Dawn. "There's so much craftiness and cunning and lying in the world," Edhi told National Public Radio in 2009. "I feel happy that God made me different from the others. I helped the most oppressed."

Widely admired for intractable integrity, Sattar only accepted private donations refusing government offers of support. He won respect from people from all strata of society so much so that a temporary truce would be declared when he and his ambulance arrived at the scene of a fight. 

Edhi's final wish was for any of his usable organs to be donated. But age and frailty meant only the cornea could be transplanted. And so they were into two blind persons after his death. Was he capable of deep love? You bet. He had the hands to help others, the feet to hasten to the poor and needy, the eyes to see misery and want and the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of his fellow human beings. 

With Abdul Sattar Edhi, human nature, often groping and flailing in mysteries of its own, rose to the occasion. 

The writer is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star.