Abdul Sattar Edhi

Edhi was born at Bantva, Gujarat, in British India, into a Memon Muslim family. After Partition the family migrated to Karachi, where in 1951 he established a small free dispensary in the Mithadar old-city district; the welfare trust he had founded earlier was restarted with an initial sum of five thousand rupees and later renamed the Bilquis Edhi Trust after his wife. In 1965 he married Bilquis, a nurse at the dispensary, who became his partner in the work and the foundation's co-chair. ^{1 2}

Funded entirely by private donations, and serving people irrespective of ethnicity, religion or status, the foundation grew into Pakistan's largest welfare organisation: more than 330 welfare centres, free nursing homes, orphanages, clinics, women's shelters and rehabilitation centres, over 1,500 ambulances offering round-the-clock emergency service, and — on the figures the English article gives — more than 20,000 abandoned infants rescued, 50,000 orphans rehabilitated and 40,000 nurses trained since its inception. It ran relief operations across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and the United States, donating US$100,000 after Hurricane Katrina (2005). Edhi kept a hands-off management style and was often critical of corruption within religious organisations, the clergy and politicians; he was a strong proponent of religious tolerance. He was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Lenin Peace Prize, the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize and Pakistan's Nishan-e-Imtiaz, among many others. ^{1 3}

Edhi died at Karachi on 8 July 2016, of kidney failure; in accordance with his wishes his corneas were donated to two blind people. He was given a state funeral — only the third state gun-carriage funeral in Pakistan's history, after Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and the only one for a person who held no state office — with the Janazah prayer at the National Stadium, Karachi, a guard of honour and a nineteen-gun salute, and the attendance of the president, the chiefs of the armed services and the country's leading politicians, and was laid to rest at Edhi Village, on the outskirts of Karachi. ^{1 4}

His faith is recorded as unknown, on a documented non-affiliation, and the case is flagged for the founder. The English article states that he was born into a Memon Muslim family — his family's background, not an attestation of his own affiliation — and then records his own public position: he expressed that he was not a "very religious person" and that he was "neither for religion or against it"; on his faith he stated that he was a "humanitarian", saying that empty words and long phrases do not impress God and that people should show Him their faith through action; the article also quotes the Los Angeles Times (1993): "Edhi says he is a Muslim — but adds that human rights is his real religion." The Arabic article reproduces this passage with the same citations, being a translation of the English one, so the attestation stands in one text family; the Urdu article adds only that he never studied at a religious school. No school is named anywhere, so no affiliation can be recorded; and the standard for atheist-or-sceptic is not met either, since he expressly affirmed God and faith shown through action, and in the same reporting called himself a Muslim. Wikidata's only religion value is Islam, generically. ^{1 3 2 4}

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