"Yes, there are extremists here," says Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid. "But they are a small minority in a nation of 165 million people. Most of us want nothing to do with violence." This is true. But like moderates everywhere, those in Pakistan have a hard time being heard over the racket rising up from their streets and television sets, a raucous soundtrack of religious sermonizing, Indo-Pakistani saber rattling, and a general gnashing of teeth that passes for public discourse. Ordinary people are also stifled by a government and police force that are among the most corrupt in the world, led by an army that answers to no one. But it is a measure of the country's underlying goodness, and a sign of hope, that 60 years after independence the most revered figure in Pakistan is not a mullah or a sports hero, but a 79-year-old man who routinely washes dried blood off dead bodies and fishes his clothes from a donation barrel.

Abdul Sattar Edhi began serving his fellow citizens a few years after the founding of Pakistan, when he opened a free clinic in Karachi. Later he bought a dented Hillman station wagon, its blue paint peeling, and turned it into Pakistan's first private ambulance. He shuttled poor people to medical care and collected the bodies of the city's homeless from the gutters, washed them, and gave them a proper burial. "I felt it was my duty as a human being," he says, recalling the revulsion he learned to overcome. "It was obvious the government wasn't going to do it."

Decades later, that hasn't changed. While the military accounts for a quarter of the national budget, less than 3 percent is spent on education, health, and public welfare. And so Edhi still tends to Pakistan's dirty work, body by body. His one-man charity is now an acclaimed international foundation. His single, beat-up old station wagon has grown into a fleet of 1,380 little white ambulances positioned across Pakistan, tended by thousands of volunteers. They are usually first to arrive on the scene of any tragedy. In May 2002, when police found the remains of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in Karachi, it was Edhi who gently collected the body parts, all ten, and took Daniel Pearl to the morgue.

Edhi was born in the Indian town of Bantva, 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Mumbai. As a teenager, he'd gone with his father to hear Jinnah, the tall, gaunt, visionary founder of Pakistan, deliver a speech urging local Muslims to join him in the new country. At first his father hesitated. But during partition, when Hindu mobs began marauding nearby, the family joined the more than 14 million people from both countries—Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs—who fled their homes and crossed to the other side of the line. As many as a million people died in sectarian riots, massacres, and killings along the way.