Columbus Dispatch: A memorial was held in Madison Township for a “martyr” yesterday.
About 100 relatives, friends and colleagues gathered to remember Dr. Mehdi Ali Qamar of Pickerington at the service at the Ba’it ul Nasir mosque of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
That wasn’t as many as the 7,000 who attended his burial service in Canada — Qamar held dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship — to mourn both his death and the sectarian violence that prompted his slaying in Pakistan. But it was his central Ohio friends and colleagues who talked about a humble man willing to help anyone, and who wore “short ties and fancy shoes.”
“I think we all laughed at his giggle when he told a joke, more than his actual jokes,” nurse Matthew Grilliot said as he stood with five tearful members of the cardiologist’s catheterization –lab team from Fairfield Medical Center.
Qamar was an inspiration and a hero to them.
“His heart was pure,” Grilliot told those who had gathered in the community’s old mosque — a converted church near the newer, domed mosque.
Qamar’s niece, Duresameen Ashraf, recalled that after her younger brother drowned several years ago trying to save someone, her uncle told her mother that “he would be her son.”
Categories: Ahmadis And Pakistan, Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Americas