Legends we lost in 2016

Abdul SattarEdhi

Born in 1926 – 1928 in bantva, Gujarat India to a middle class family, Edhi’s mother used to give him one paisa for food and another to give to a beggar. When he was 11, she became paralyzeddue to a stroke and died when he was only 19. Those formative years taking care of his sick mother gave Edhi insight into helping others. He later moved to Pakistan during the partition of the Subcontinent and was a small trader in the wholesale cloth market on M.A. Jinnah road. It’s with the help of people in this very market that Edhi started his first 8 x 8 feet Center to help the people of Karachi. Buoyed by his Memon roots supporting him Edhi went on to become the greatest humanitarian that ever lived as per the Huffington Post. In a city where public aid was failing,Edhi founded the largest private ambulance service of this world and single handedly changed the state of the welfare system in Pakistan. He was known as the Angel of mercy and simply as Maulana, by the same community that kick started his journey, till the day of his death. Since it’s inception, the Edhi Foundation has rescued over 20,000+ abandoned infants, rehabilitated over 50,000+ orphans and has trained over 40,000+ nurses. It also runs more than 330 welfare centers in rural and urban Pakistan which operate as food kitchens, rehabilitation homes, shelters for abandoned women & children and clinics for the mentally handicapped. He passed away on 8^th July 2016 due to kidney failure and was succeeded by his son Faisal Edhi and his wife BilquisEdhi, both of whom run the day-to-day operations of the Edhi foundation.

AmjadSabri 

Born on 23^rd Dec 1976, AmjadSabri was a proponent of the Sufi tradition of Qawwali. He followed in the foot steps of his father GhulamFareedSabri of the legendarySabri brothers. He spent his life in the urban ghetto of Liaqutabad, Karachi till his last day refusing to move to more elite surroundings even after achieving endless fame and success, because he liked being around people who knew him for a long time, he felt it was where he belonged. Shooting to super stardom in the qawwali and ghazal scene in Karachi, Amjad was a vaunted host and entertainer and a very humble human being. He was killed due to a targeted shooting on 22^nd June 2016 and the murder was claimed by a splinter group of the Taliban soon after.

Muhammad Ali 

Born Cassius Clay on January 17^th 1942 and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he began training as an amateur boxer when he was only 12 years old. At 18, he won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, and converted to Islam shortly afterwards. At 22, he won the WBA and WBC heavyweight titles from Sonny Liston in an upset in 1964. Clay then changed his legal name from Cassius Clay, which he called his “slave name”, to Muhammad Ali, and gave a message of racial pride for African Americans and resistance to white domination during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Muhammad Ali injured white nationalistic pride on many occasions inside and outside the ring, nowhere more perhaps, then by his refusal to the draft and enlistment in the army for the Vietnam war. He is known for many legendary quotes like “Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee” and “The man who has no imagination has no wings”. Ali is regarded as one of the leading heavyweight boxers of the 20th century. He remains the only three-time lineal heavyweight champion; he won the title in 1964, 1974, and 1978. Between February 25, 1964, and September 19, 1964, Ali reigned as the undisputed heavyweight champion. He is the only boxer to be named The Ring Magazine Fighter of the Year five times. He was ranked as the greatest athlete of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated and the Sports Personality of the Century by the BBC. ESPN SportsCentury ranked him the 3rd greatest athlete of the 20th century. Nicknamed “The Greatest”, he was involved in several historic boxing matches. Notable among these were the first Liston fight; the “Fight of the Century”, “Super Fight II” and the “Thrilla in Manila” versus his rival Joe Frazier; and “The Rumble in the Jungle” versus George Foreman. In an era where boxers let their managers talk, Ali thrived in talking himself, both free styling and using spoken poetry styles, Ali was the master of the trash talk, sometimes outrageously predicting when his opponent would go down and even more outrageously making it happen in the fight after his proclamations. He left the world on 3^rd June 2016 due to septic shock.