Abdul Sattar Edhi

“People have become educated, but have not become human.”

— Abdul Sattar Edhi

His Story

Abdul Sattar Edhi was born in 1928 in Bantva, a small town in Gujarat, India, into a Memon Muslim family. He had little formal schooling — by his own account, he was never a student of books. His education came from a single, unforgettable source: his mother, who taught him from early childhood to notice the people around him who had nothing, and to do something about it. She gave him small amounts of money as a boy, not to spend on himself, but to give to someone who needed it more. That lesson never left him.

After Partition in 1947, his family migrated to Karachi, Pakistan. There, with no wealth, no institutional backing, and no formal religious credentials, he began doing what his mother had taught him — one act of help at a time. In 1951 he started what would become the Edhi Foundation, beginning with a small dispensary for the poor of Karachi.

He wore the same simple clothes for decades — by his own description, he owned only two sets of them. He never drew a salary from the organization he built. He lived in a single room with a small kitchenette at the foundation's headquarters until the end of his life. Everything the foundation earned went back into the people it served.

What He Built

From one dispensary, Edhi built what became the largest welfare organization in Pakistan's history — and one of the largest volunteer-run humanitarian networks on Earth:

• →The world's largest volunteer ambulance network — answering emergencies in cities and remote villages alike, free of charge
• →Cradles placed outside Edhi centers across Pakistan, where mothers unable to care for a newborn could leave the baby anonymously and safely, rather than abandon it on the street
• →Orphanages, shelters for the homeless, and homes for the elderly with nowhere else to go
• →Free hospitals, maternity homes, and rehabilitation centers for the mentally ill and for people struggling with addiction
• →A morgue service that washed, prepared, and buried unclaimed and unidentified bodies with dignity — including those other institutions refused to touch
• →Disaster relief delivered during floods, earthquakes, and conflicts, often among the first responders on the scene

His Philosophy

Edhi served everyone who needed help — Muslim, Hindu, Christian, anyone — without asking what they believed. His ambulances carried the dead and dying of every faith to be buried or cremated according to their own rites. He said true faith was shown through service, not through declarations. He did not need a theology degree to know this. He needed only what his mother had already given him.

This is exactly the message at the heart of We Are One — that submission to God is not a credential issued by an institution. It is a posture of the heart, proven by what the hands do. Edhi never wrote a single line of poetry. But Rumi, Bulleh Shah, and Kabir would have recognized him instantly as one of their own — a man whose entire life was the couplet, and whose love for God was inseparable from his love for the poorest person in front of him.