Syed Sajjad Hussain
Syed Sajjad Hussain was a Bangladeshi academic and writer. He served as the 4th Vice-chancellor of the University of Rajshahi.
Early life
Hussain was born on 14 January 1920, to a Bengali Muslim family of Syeds in the village of Alokdia in Magura, Bengal Province to Syed Ahmad Hussain and Khurshida Talat Banu, who died when Hussain was five. When he was four, his parents moved to the Dhaka District.Education
Hussain received his secondary education at Dhaka High Madrassah. He earned his master's in English from the University of Dhaka in 1942, earning a BA the year before in the same subject. During his masters studies, the East Pakistan Literary Society was founded by Hussain with him as chairman which aimed to disseminate the message of Pakistan and forge a distinct Bengali Muslim literary idiom and held a successful conference in 1943 and presided over a EPLS conference in 1944 in Calcutta; Hussain also contributed to a Bengali fortnightly called Pakistan as well as to other newspapers like Azad, which he was invited to contribute by the invitation of Abul Kalam Shamsuddin. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham in 1952, where he wrote a thesis on Kipling and India, later published as a book.Career
Hussain debuted his teaching career at Calcutta Islamic College in 1944. In September 1947, Hussain was transferred to Sylhet's M.C. College where he spent a year teaching. He was a professor at Department of English of the University of Dhaka during 1948–1969. He was then appointed the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Rajshahi in 1969, a post he held until being appointed Vice-Chancellor of Dhaka University in July 1971.Hussain worked as a professor of English at Umm al-Qura University in Makkah, Saudi Arabia during 1975–1985. He moved back to Bangladesh in the late 1980s, where in retirement wrote for English and Bengali newspapers in Dhaka, reviewed books for the Muslim World Book Review published from Leicester, and published many of his books, and lived in Dhaka until his death in January 1995, while he was writing a biography of the Prophet Muhammad.
Hussain travelled across the world during his career. In 1954 he visited Burma as part of a student delegation. In 1954, he attended a PEN conference in Holland and a year later organised a PEN conference in Dhaka. In 1956, he visited the USA on a leadership grant. In 1962, he visited India as a member of the Pakistan Delegation to the Commonwealth Educational Conference. He was a member of a Pakistani delegation to the October Day Celebrations in China. In 1970, he visited Japan to attend a conference on Religion. He visited Iran twice, firstly in 1970 as leader of the RCD team and in 1971 to attend the 2500 anniversary of monarchy Iran celebrations. He visited Poland in 1971 as a delegate to the Professors of English conference in Pozniak. In 1977, Hussain participated in the conference on education in Makkah, Saudi Arabia.
Hussain was one of the founding members of the Asiatic Society of Pakistan, in which he served a term as its secretary.