"In Retrospection" Taken from the flap of the book:
Mr. Abul Hashim was born on the 27th of January 1905, in the district of Burdwan, West Bengal. His Father Moulvi Abul Kasem was a reputed public man of Bengal. He graduated from the university of Calcutta in 1928 and joined the district bar of Burdwan in 1931. His father died in October 1936 and the Muslims of Burdwan as a token of gratitude for his father's life-long public service elected him in November 1936 to the first Legislative Assembly constituted under the MacDonld Award. He joined the Muslim League in 1937. He was elected a member of the working Committee of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League in the year 1941 and was elected General Secretary of the Bengal Provincial Muslim League in November 1943 and carried the responsibility till the end of the struggle for Pakistan. He was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly of British India which was eventually boycotted by the Muslim League. Along with Sarat Chandra Bose he initiated the movement for a united sovereign Bengal and loyally and faithfully worked for that movement till the end. From the partition of Bengal in August 1947 upto April 1950 he stayed in West Bengal and functioned as the leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly. He migrated to Pakistan in April 1950.
In 1952 he was a member of the All Party State Language Committee of Action and presided over its very important meeting held in the afternoon of February 20. He was arrested by the then Muslim League government on the early morning of February 25 and was detained in jail for about sixteen months. He worked in opposition to the then Muslim League but joined it in 1956. He was made the first Director of the Islamic Academy at Dacca in 1960 by President Ayub Khan. In August 1962, he was appointed a member of the Islamic Ideology Council of Pakistan and became the Chief Organiser, East Pakistan Muslim League, in September 1962. He died in Dacca in the afternoon of October 5, 1974. Even as Muslim Leaguer he was always opposed to the system of separate electorates, was a consistent upholder of Bengali culture and a great admirer of Rabindranath Tagore. During the Ayub regime, he very strongly and fearlessly opposed all the efforts of the Ayub Government in repressing the distinctive culture of Bengal. During the political turmoil of 1971 he remained in Dacca but refused to extend any co-operation to the Yahya regime, which he considered totally un-Islamic and barbarous. Mr. Abul Hashim had written a number of books and articles on various subjects. His first book, 'The Creed of Islam' was published in 1950. He also wrote a tafsir of Surat-al-Fatiha in Bengali which was translated into Arabic. He was the chairman of the Board of Translators who undertook a new translation of the Holy Quran into Bengali published by the Islamic Academy. He is also the author of 'Arabic Made Easy. For 'In Retrospection' he wrote a preface a few days before his death but its text could not be found among his papers after wards. One of the things he said in that preface was that his book 'In Retrospection was not meant to be a complete memoir. It primarily deals with only that period of his political life in which he played the most effective role in the politics of Bengal.
