Syed Sajjad Hussain

Syed Sajjad Hussain (14 January 1920 – 12 January 1995) 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 (formerly under Jessore District), 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. Pakistani Government immediately put Hussain in the vacant position. After the surrender of Dhaka in December 1971, Hussain was seized by guerillas and tortured. He however managed to survive albeit he was paralysed and admitted to Dhaka Medical College Hospital by the order of the Indian army. On his release, he moved to England, where he was briefly a fellow at Cambridge University.

Views Hussain was thus an active supporter of the Pakistan Movement in his youth and embodied the idealism of the youth during the 1940s. Indeed, when Muhammad Ali Jinnah visited Dhaka in the winter of 1936 on his mission to reorganise the Muslim League, Hussain had his first opportunity of hearing Jinnah and was immediately won over to the cause of Muslim nationalism. He was one of the first to welcome the Pakistan scheme in a letter to the Statesman of Calcutta in June 1941. Hussain remained dedicated to the idea and ideology of Pakistan throughout his life.

In popular culture In 2021 Pakistan’s Hum TV released an historical drama based on Hussain’s book Wastes of Times, a miniseries called Khaab Toot Jaatay Hain.