Muhammad Shahidullah

Early life and education

Muhammad Ibrahim was born on 10 July 1885 in the village of Peyara in the erstwhile Bengal Presidency's 24 Parganas district. His mother, Harunnesa, later changed his name to Muhammad Shahidullah. His father, Mafizuddin Ahmed, was a warden of the shrine of Pir Gorachand.

Career Shahidullah began his career by teaching at Jessore Zila School in 1908. After working as the headmaster of Sitakunda High School for some time in 1914, he practiced law at Bashirhat in 24 Parganas. In 1915, he was elected as vice-chairman of the town's municipality.

At the invitation of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, he joined the University of Calcutta as Sharatchandra Lahiri Research Fellow (1919–21) under Dinesh Chandra Sen. In 1920, he published "one of his most important papers titled "Outlines of an Historical Grammar of the Bengali Language" in the Journal of the Department of Letters of the University of Calcutta."

He served as an editor for the Islami Bishwakosh project for a while.

Muhammad Shahidullah's mastery of different languages was widely regarded as impressive and outstanding. He was fluent in 24 languages and had working knowledge of 18 languages. Some of the notable languages are Bengali, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, English, French, Assamese, Oriya, Maithili, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kashmiri, Nepali, Sinhala, Tibetan, Sindhi, Sanskrit, Pali, etc.