Hasan was born in Lucknow, India. He belonged to a taluqdari (madad-i ma'ash) family of the United Provinces. He was the son of Saiyid Abdul Hasan and Nur Fatima Begum. His father was a district settlement officer and later president of the Court of Wards in the United Provinces. His maternal grandfather was Sir Syed Wazir Hasan, chief justice of the Court of Oudh and a well known president of the Muslim League, who had called for Hindu-Muslim unity in 1936. His maternal uncles were Syed Sajjad Zaheer, a barrister and an eminent Marxist thinker and Syed Ali Zaheer, a barrister who became the law minister of Uttar Pradesh and India's ambassador to Iran. Hasan was married to Nawabzadi Khurshid Laqa Begum Sahiba, the eldest daughter of Nawab Raza Ali Khan of Rampur, a 15 Gun Salute State in the former United Provinces. They have two children, Sayyid Sirajul Hasan, an eminent physicist, who retired as director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore and Sayyida Talat Fatima Hasan, who is a very successful entrepreneur in the USA.

Hasan attended the Sultan ul Madaris, Lucknow. Then he went to the La Martiniere Boys' College in Kolkata,. He completed his graduation from Muir Central College, Allahabad, where he was a student of Professor R.P. Tripathi. Later he went to New College, Oxford, where he completed an M.A. and D.Phil. in Indian history. In Oxford, he was president of the Oxford India Majlis.

Academic

He began his academic career as a Lecturer in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He was appointed as Professor in the Department of History at Aligarh Muslim University, of which he was a Chairperson as well. He contributed greatly to the growth of the History department in Aligarh in its initial years. Later he became the General Secretary and then the President of the Indian History Congress. He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society in London.

Political

A secularist with an abiding faith in leftism, Hasan was a member of the Rajya Sabha from 1969-1978. From 1971 to 1977, he was the Union Minister of State (with independent charge) for Education, Social Welfare & Culture in the Government of India. As India's education minister, he founded the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi. He was also the architect behind the setting up of 27 social science research institutes in India under the aegis of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, such as the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (1973).^[9] When he was a minister, under an act of the parliament, the funding and management of the Rampur Raza Library was given to the Government of India. From 1977 to 1980 he was Vice President of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi.^[10]

He was instrumental in imp