Muhammad Mohar Ali

Muhammad Mohar Ali ; 1929–2007) was a British Bangladeshi lecturer, historian, barrister and Islamic scholar. He is the only Bengali to have received the King Faisal International Prize.

Biography Ali was born in 1929 in Khulna in Bengal. He had an elder brother. Their father, a landowner and small businessman, died when Ali was about five or six years old.

Ali joined the Hooghly Madrasah in 1944-45. He married and had three sons.

Studying at Dhaka University, he obtained a degree in history in 1952 and a master's degree in 1953. After that he taught history at various colleges. They included Michael Madhusudan College in Jessore (1954-55), Dacca Government College (1955-56), Chittagong Government College (1956–57) and Rajshahi Government College (1957). He joined the faculty of the history department of Dhaka University in 1958. He wrote his first five books between 1954 and 1960. He was also a member of the East Pakistan Education Commission and a member of the Pakistan Historical Records Commission.

Ali was committed to the idea of a unified Pakistan. He backed the Pakistani government's position of opposing the independence of East Pakistan.

Ali died at his home in Woodford, Essex on 11 April 2007.

While most of his books and essays are in English, he has translated Jawhart al-Bukhari from Arabic into Bengali and published a word for word English translation of the Qur'an in addition to Arabic essays such as Orientalists' Claims concerning the Glorious Qur'an.

He has also written books in response to the Orientalists' approach to the biography of Muhammad and their theories about the Qur'an: Sirat Al-Nabi and the Orientalists (1997) and The Qur'an and the Orientalists (2004).

Main works