Dr. Syed Sajjad Husain (1920-95) was educated at Dhaka and Nottingham Universities. He completed a PhD at Nottingham in 1952. For his PhD, he studied Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and explored the British author’s knowledge of the social and religious life of the Indian subcontinent.

He was professor of English in Dhaka University until 1969, and joined Ummul-Qura University in Makkah, Saudi Arabia in 1975, retiring in 1985. He was for a short period in 1975 a Fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge University, England. He travelled widely in Asia, Europe, and North America.

He was a delegate to a congress of Muslim scholars in Islamabad, Pakistan (1969), the conference on world religions in Kyoto, Japan (1970), and the congress of Iranologists in Shiraz, Iran (1971). He also participated in the international conference on Muslim education held in Makkah, Saudi Arabia (1977).

Husain’s publications include A Young Muslim’s Guide to Religions in the World (1992), Crisis in Muslim Education (in collaboration with Syed Ali Ashraf [Hodder and Stoughton, 1979]); Mixed Grill (a collection of essays on religion and culture [Orient Longman, 1963]), Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Manuscripts (Asiatic Society, Dhaka, 1960), an essay on Pakistani writing in English in The Commonwealth Pen (ed. by Alan McLeod, Cornell University Press, USA, 1961), and the entry on Bangladesh in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He was a contributor to Islamic Encyclopaedia published from Turkey. Husain also wrote in Bengali a two-volume history of English Literature published by the Bangla Academy, Dhaka (1984, 1989).