I had already put up the link to the Edhi Foundation website where you could nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize a couple of days ago. However, I thought it would be a good idea to put up a post about him just to give the readers an idea of this man’s great achievements and his humble beginnings.

From another Pakistani blog.

As importantly, he has done this – in his words – ‘wholesale’. He has single handedly built – literally by begging – a social services structure at a national scale. Bigger than what governments have. He has never taken a ruppee as salary himself. He lives in a two room apartment that most middle class Pakistanis would not call home and he oversees the largest ambulance network in the world, now with airplanes and helicopters, a multi-million dollar enterprise of relief, of goodwill, and of humanitarianism. If he does not deserve the Nobel Award, I do not know who does.

A short biography can be found on the Edhi Foundation website.

A great deal of detail on his life, management style, types of services, expansion plans, international services and offices and awards can be found here.

I am also quoting some interesting facts that were put up in another Pakistani blog

  1. I did not realize how much he dislikes being called ‘Maulana.’ There are so many times in the book where he explains that he does not consider himself worthy of that title and how he stops his associates from using it, but they do anyhow.
  2. He seems to have a rather nasty temper. But he knows it. And he knows that he is a tough task master on those he works with. He recounts incidences where he literally throws things in the room and at walls and shouts at people because they did not follow instructions or indulged in waste. But as he points out, he never asks others to do any more than he does himself.
  3. The accounts of his romantic side. Including his falling for this Turkish girl on a train.
  4. How his distractors have always been out to malign him. First the “memon seths” who did not like his style of self-help social work. Then the religious leaders who did not like his style of, what he calls, “ijtihaad” and “sufiism” and who tried to drive him out of the lucrative hide-collection business. Then the MQM folks. And more.
  5. By far the most riveting part is where he recounts how some military people (intelligence agencies) – he seems to be saying Hamid Gul’s people – tried to use him as a front man for a counter coup and ultimately things got so bad that he had to leave the country and take temporary exile in London.