Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi (1921–1994) was a modern historian of medieval India, mainly focused on history of Islam in South Asia.[1]
| Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi | |
| Birth Place: | Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, India |
| Discipline: | History, Sufism, Indian Freedom Movement, Mughal History |
Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi obtained his education from Agra University, where he earned his BA (1942), PhD (1949) and D.Litt. (1964).
Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi was born in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, India in 1921 to a family of Shia Muslim Zamindars. He married his wife Nasim Zahra Rizvi, similarly from a Shi'ite family of Zamindars from Tajpur, Ambedkar Nagar District, Uttar Pradesh.
He had 4 children- Parveen, Fazal, Faiz and Abul.
He started his career from Aligarh Muslim University. Rizvi was one of the favorite students of Professor Mohammad Habib, and like him, started his academic career by writing on Sufism.[2] He was later appointed as head of the history department, Jammu and Kashmir University, and was also appointed as Secretary of the History of the Freedom Movement by the government of Uttar Pradesh. He worked as a research associate in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London between 1962-62 and was fellow in the same institution in the year 1969.[3]
He joined the Department of Asian Civilizations at the Australian National University, Canberra in 1967 at the urging of his University of London colleague Arthur Llewellyn Basham (Professor A. L. Basham), where he worked until 1986.
He was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 1969.[4] In 1972, he also joined Jawaharlal Nehru University as a visiting faculty.
After retirement Dr. Rizvi continued his research and travel to libraries or giving talks in Universities across the world, spending six months of the year as a visiting fellow in what was then ANU's Department of Far Eastern History of the Research School of Pacific Studies, and six months in the field. He died during one such expeditions in the field on 3 September 1994 in Mashhad, Iran.[5]