Pakistan grieves for champion of the poor Abdul Sattar Edhi

In Karachi, the city Edhi had served tirelessly for more than 60 years, tens of thousands attended his burial prayers at the national cricket stadium in the first state funeral since 1988.

A girl holds a lamp during candlelight vigil in honor of philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi in Karachi, Pakistan July 9, 2016. Akhtar Soomro / Reuters

Abdul Sattar Edhi, the iconic humanitarian and philanthropist universally revered in Pakistan, was buried on Saturday after a state funeral in Karachi. He died on Friday after losing a years-long battle with illness.

Edhi suffered from diabetes and the effects of kidney failure, his son, Faisal Edhi, said. The 88-year-old had reportedly refused offers of medical care abroad or even treatment at a private hospital in Karachi, insisting on a public facility. “I come from ordinary people,” Edhi told the filmmakers of a recent documentary about his work. “And to find me, look among ordinary people.”

Edhi was buried in a plot in one of the many free graveyards run by his philanthropic foundation, wearing the clothes he died in — one of his two sets of shalvar kamiz, the only clothes he owned and that he washed himself.

In the city he had served tirelessly and without personal enrichment for more than 60 years, tens of thousands of Karachiites attended Edhi’s burial prayers at the national cricket stadium on Friday afternoon. They were also attended by the most powerful men in Pakistan, including Gen Raheel Sharif, the chief of army staff, and other senior military officials, as well as the chief ministers of Sindh and Punjab and the president, Mamnoon Hussain.

“He was a humanitarian and a man of the people till his very last breath, and we cannot thank him enough for being a guiding light towards empathy in a nation divided,” Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif said in a statement announcing the state funeral, the first in Pakistan since 1988. “If anyone deserves to be wrapped in the flag of the nation he served, it is him.”

Mr Sharif, who is recuperating in London after undergoing surgery last month, was not able to attend the funeral.

Under heavy security at the stadium, the pomp of the state funeral provided a stark contrast to Edhi’s ascetic life. VIPs including military officers and politicians jostled for places in the rows of mourners closest to Edhi’s body – and news cameras – an ironic display by those in charge of a state whose unfulfilled responsibilities to Pakistan’s poorest and most vulnerable Edhi performed selflessly for decades.

Edhi was born in 1928 in a village in Gujarat district of British India and migrated as a refugee to the newly formed state of Pakistan in 1947. He and his impoverished family settled in Karachi. The new government’s failure to assist his ailing mother was the event that put Edhi on to the path of social work and philanthropy. He dropped out of school and wrote in his 1996 autobiography that the world of suffering became his tutor.

He began by opening a free clinic in 1951, and then drove a single ambulance in a city that had no such public services for the poor. With his wife, Bilquis, Edhi went on to fill the void in public services for society’s worst off left behind by a state struggling to contend with Karachi’s rapid growth.

The Edhi Foundation now runs a vast network of welfare services across Karachi – which spread to other parts of Pakistan – including the world’s largest volunteer ambulance service, health clinics, shelters for battered women, abandoned children and the elderly. It provides care to drug addicts, vocational training to the poor, maternity and family planning services, as well as free legal and financial aid and medical care to prisoners.

After stories of out-of-wedlock children being killed, Edhi put cradles with signs saying “Don’t sin again” or “Don’t murder again, put the baby in the cradle”, in front of his clinics. Tens of thousands of babies have been left in the foundation’s care in this way, with many being adopted by more well-off Pakistani families.

The foundation runs on the millions of dollars donated by a Pakistani public eager to help alleviate the effects of poverty but deeply wary of misuse and corruption. In such a context, the Edhi Foundation has maintained public trust and its sterling reputation, growing into the largest charitable organisation in Pakistan.

Until recent years when his old age and health prevented him, Edhi worked long hours in the day-to-day operations of the foundation in Karachi, even working in ambulances and washing corpses at his morgues. During the bouts of widespread political violence and terrorism in Karachi during the 1990s and over the past decade, warring groups did not target Edhi’s workers, because they provided their services without prejudice.

While he is probably the most universally beloved figure in Pakistan since the country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Edhi fell foul of forces whose claims to authority his work explicitly and implicitly challenged.

In a city where political parties and Islamist militant groups vie to increase their legitimacy by filling the role of a failing state, including through social welfare, Edhi’s motiveless, radically equal humanitarian model posed a threat. Right-wing religious groups have been the most vocally opposed to Edhi, branding him “un-Islamic” for his work with religious minorities and demands for their equality.

"There is no religion higher than humanity," Edhi told The National in an interview in April, in response to such criticism.

The attempts to smear him had little effect. In the end, the immense moral weight of his life’s work and personal creed obscured all else, and was reflected in the outpouring of grief and emotion across Pakistan on Saturday.

“I’ve spent my life living according to my principles, in poverty, in simplicity,” he said in April. “To look after and help the poor – this is my work and my purpose.”