Humayun Azad

Humayun Azad (Bengali: হুমায়ূন আজাদ ; 28 April 1947 – 12 August 2004) was a Bangladeshi author, poet, scholar and linguist. He wrote more than seventy titles. He is regarded and honored as the most powerful and influential writer in the history of modern Bengali literature. His writings against religious fundamentalism received both positive and negative reviews. He was threatened and attacked by Islamist fundamentalist groups for his writings.
Azad was awarded the Bangla Academy Award in 1986 for his contributions to Bengali linguistics. In 2012, the Government of Bangladesh honored him with Ekushey Padak posthumously.

Professional and literary life

Azad was born in the village of Rarhikhal in Bikrampur, Munshiganj district on 28 April 1947. He earned BA degree in Bengali language and literature from University of Dhaka. He obtained his PhD in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1976. He later served as a faculty member of the department of Bengali language and literature at the University of Dhaka. His early career produced works on Bengali linguistics, notably syntax. He is regarded as a leading linguist of the Bengali language.

Towards the end of the 1980s, he started to write newspaper column focusing on contemporary socio-political issues. His commentaries continued throughout the 1990s and were later published as books as they grew in numbers. Through his writings of the 1990s, he established himself as a freethinker and appeared to be an agnostic. In his works, he openly criticised religious extremism, as well as Islam, the major religion in Bangladesh.

In 1992 Azad published the first comprehensive feminist book in Bengali titled Naari (Woman). Largely akin to The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir in contents and ideas, Naari received positive reviews as a literary work and earned Azad popularity as an author. In this work Azad painstakingly compiled the feminist ideas of the West that underlie the feminist contributions of the subcontinent's socio-political reformers and drew attention to the anti-women attitude of some acclaimed Bengali writers including Rabindranath Tagore. The work, critical of the patriarchal and male-chauvinistic attitude of religion towards women, attracted negative reaction from the conservatives. The Government of Bangladesh banned the book in 1995. The ban was eventually lifted in 2000, following a legal battle that Azad won in the High Court of the country.

Assassination attempt

Azad had been fearing for his life ever since excerpts of his new novel, Pak Sar Jamin Sad Bad (Pakistan's national anthem; Blessed be the Sacred Land) were first published in The Daily Ittefaq's Eid supplement in 2003. In that write-up, he tried to expose the politics and ideology of Islamic fundamentalists of Bangladesh. After that book had been published, he started receiving various threats from the fundamentalists. In an email to Mukto-mona, an independent website, where he was then a member, Azad wrote:

The Ittefaq published a novel by me named Pak Sar Jamin Saad Baad in its Eid issue in December 3. It deals with the condition of Bangladesh for the last two years. Now the (religious) fundamentalists are bringing out regular processions against me, demanding exemplary punishment. The attached two files with this letter will help you understand.

— Humayun Azad

On 27 February 2004, he became the victim of a vicious assassination attempt by assailants near the campus of the University of Dhaka during the annual Bangla Academy book fair. A week prior to Azad's assault, Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, one of the renowned religious leaders of Bangladesh demanded, in the parliament, that Azad's political satire Pak Sar Jamin Sad Bad would be banned and demanded the introduction of the Blasphemy Act on the author.

In 2006, the commander of Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) admitted to the RAB interrogators that his operatives carried out the attack on writer Azad, as well as two other murders, bomb blasts, and attacks on cinemas.

Death

On 12 August 2004, Azad was found dead in his apartment in Munich, Germany, where he had arrived a week earlier to conduct research on the nineteenth century German romantic poet Heinrich Heine, several months after the Islamists' machete attack on him at a book fair, which had left him grievously injured. His family demanded an investigation, alleging that the extremists who had attempted the earlier assassination had a role in this death. While alive, Azad had expressed his wish to donate his body to medical college after his death. But he was buried in Rarhikhal, his village home in Bangladesh as doctors denied to take his body for medical research, as several days had passed to reach his body to Bangladesh from Germany.

Awards

Azad has received numerous awards; mainly for his all literature works.

• Bangla Academy Award (1986)
• Ekushey Padak (2012)

• "Humayun Azad found dead in Munich". The Daily Star. 14 August 2004. Retrieved 8 August 2015. 
• "Proper probe into death of Humayun Azad demanded". The Daily Star. 12 August 2009. 
• Staff Correspondent. "Humayun Azad found dead in Munich". The Daily Star Web Edition Vol. 5 Num 79. The Daily Star. Retrieved 2016-09-07. 
• "হুমায়ুন আজাদ, ভেতর-বাহিরে". Retrieved 2016-09-07.