Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (8 September 1892 – 5 December 1963) was a Bengali statesman, the last prime minister of undivided Bengal (1946–1947) and the fifth prime minister of Pakistan (1956–1957).¹ He founded the Awami League and led the United Front that swept the 1954 East Bengal elections.¹

He was born on 8 September 1892 at Midnapore. The English article traces the Suhrawardy family to Shihab al-Din Umar al-Suhrawardi, the twelfth-century Baghdad Sufi after whom the Suhrawardiyya order is named, and describes his grandfather Ubaidullah Al Ubaidi Suhrawardy as a Dhaka-based Sufi leader; his father, Justice Sir Zahid Suhrawardy, was a judge of the Calcutta High Court.¹ That Sufi lineage is his family's background: no source names a school or an order affiliation for Huseyn himself, and Wikidata gives his religion as Islam only.²

He entered Calcutta politics in the 1920s, became deputy mayor of Calcutta, and emerged as a leader of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League.¹ In April 1946 he succeeded Khawaja Nazimuddin as prime minister of Bengal, the office he held through Direct Action Day, the partition of Bengal — against which he proposed a united sovereign Bengal — and independence.¹ In Pakistan he founded the Awami League, served as law minister, led the opposition, and became prime minister in September 1956, resigning in October 1957; after the 1958 coup he was jailed by the martial-law government.¹

He died of a heart attack at Beirut on 5 December 1963 and was buried in Dhaka beside Khawaja Nazimuddin and A. K. Fazlul Huq in the Mausoleum of Three Leaders.¹

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