He said he felt an urge to do welfare work after “observing the environment I was living in, where injustice, bribery and robbery were common”. He set up his first simple pharmacy offering drugs and basic medical care, regardless of people’s ability to pay, in a tent next to his family home in Jodia bazaar.

The area, now a teeming slum, is still the headquarters of the Edhi Foundation, which is run out of a ramshackle building where he lived to the end of his days in a tiny backroom. Doctors were persuaded to offer their services free and he raised the money to pay for medicines. Even in old age, he could still be seen on the streets stopping passers-by and cars for cash donations, with no one asking for receipts.

Edhi’s charitable activities expanded in 1957 when an Asian flu epidemic swept through Karachi. He borrowed money for tents to treat people who were only asked to contribute financially if they could afford it. “It was the first mass recognition of my work,” Edhi later told the journalist Steve Inskeep. A single generous donation from a businessman, a fellow member of the Memon community, allowed Edhi to buy his first ambulance, which he drove himself around the city. Once asked why he was prepared to help Christians and Hindus alike, Edhi replied, “because my ambulance is more Muslim than you”. A women’s dispensary would later open and then a maternity clinic.

Through his work, Edhi met Bilquis Bano, who became his wife and a key figure in the burgeoning charity empire. They worked together during one of the toughest periods of Edhi’s life, the 1965 war between India and Pakistan which saw Karachi bombed. The couple cared for the civilian victims and organised 45 funerals, with Bilquis cleaning the bodies of women and Edhi preparing the men for burial. It was said he washed thousands of dead bodies during his life, with his foundation finding space in its graveyards for anyone who needed it. In his memoir, A Mirror to the Blind, he made clear his distaste for anyone who thought themselves too grand to touch the dead.

The Edhi Foundation ultimately became a multimillion-dollar enterprise run directly by Edhi, his wife and their four children. It is most famous for its fleet of 1,500 minivan ambulances that are always first on the scene of an accident or, more frequently, in the last decade terrorist attack. The foundation estimates it transports a million people to hospital each year, charging a tiny fee for the ride. In Karachi, rival gangs have been known to call temporary ceasefires to their gun battles to allow Edhi’s minimally trained ambulance staff to collect the dead and wounded.

In a country with a negligible public welfare system Edhi offered cradle-to-grave services. Some 20,000 people have Edhi registered as a parent or guardian after he and his wife began taking in abandoned babies. They started to place cribs outside their offices where unwanted infants could be left. It was a court case filed