Asghar Ali Engineer (b.1931) is a pioneering Indian scholar and the author as well as editor of more than fifty books. He is both an activist and intellectual known for his profound commitment to issues of social justice in Islam. He has written extensively on justice, liberation, gender, reform, peace, violence and modernism. His new biography 'A Living Faith: My Quest for Peace, Harmony and Social Change' is an account of his life long struggle as an Indian Muslim.

Engineer was born into a Bohra, (a Shi’ah sub-sect) family in Maharashtra, and later worked as an...