He went to school in Pakistan and later studied electrical engineering at the Imperial College London and Master of Business Administration at the University of Melbourne.
His first novel, Passarola Rising (2006), was published by Viking Penguin in Australia, USA, Canada and India and translated into Spanish and Portuguese.
It is set in Europe during the eighteenth century and is the fictionalised story of a true life Brazilian priest and aviation pioneer, Bartolomeu de Gusmão, who built a flying ship but fell foul of the Inquisition.
Written in the style of an old-fashioned adventure story, it is a veiled criticism of the scientific materialism emerging from the European Enlightenment, and its inability to explain spiritual and supernatural phenomena.
In 2010, Abidi wrote an essay on Pakistan, The Road to Chitral, for Granta Online, which is a travelogue and a meditation on violence in the region.