From the grimacing faces of my colleagues I understood that I was the only one not disgusted. They washed their hands vigorously, smelt their clothes repeatedly and complained incessantly of the stench having seeped under their skins. Then they rushed home to bathe, scrubbed their clothes and disinfected them, sometimes gave them away saying, ‘the very weave was stricken’. There was nowhere to go with this attitude. We could not reduce suffering unless we rose above our own senses...cringing was the first and the greatest hindrance that blocked our way, the most brutal, but also the most understandable.

I began at Mithadar and brought back bloated, drowned bodies from the sea. Black bodies that crumbled with one touch. I picked them up from rivers, from inside wells, from roadsides, accident sites and hospitals. I picked them up from manholes and gutters, from under bridges, from railway bogies, from tracks, water sheds and drains. When families forsook them and authorities threw them away, I picked them up and brought them home, to my work force, spreading the stench in the air forever.

Many years had passed raising questions and searching for answers. When the anxiety at the vastness of the areas I must cover overwhelmed me, I took courage from the Prophet Muhammad’s (Pbuh) example. He was confronted with enormous opposition and more hypocrites than friends. Contemplating this, I reached back to Islam and began to examine the shambles it lay in and at last I found the core, the predominant factor crucial to social development.

Islam instructed a way of life that emphasised the essential qualities of self-help and compassion, it instructed all the crucial attitudes that I had discovered as solutions and all were missing in application. Islam was a complete programme for human uplift, but its instructions were either unheeded or distorted, meanings and interpretations were usurped, self-help and labour considered shameful, its people strayed like lost sheep.

Diagnosing the beginning accurately, inevitably led to the correct solution. The distance between preaching and practising removed, the two were one. I would have to interpret the message with the way I lived my life, that for this purpose I did not need to be a scholar was a revelation. Islamic simplicity enveloped all its jurisdictions under one rubric, humanitarianism, and all religions did the same.

Looking back after a lifetime of dedicated social work: I sat on the footpath outside my Mithadar office. At the same spot where forty years ago, after my mother’s death, I had put down my bundle of belongings and observed the 14-foot wide unpaved alley, that crossed over at both ends of the street...