[7] Ali's mother, Amatul Mannan Khatun, belonged to the Chowdhuries of Kala and Bahadurpur, an Islamised branch of the Pal family of Panchakhanda.

Later, in 1921 Mujtaba joined the Indian freedom struggle and left his school in Sylhet after some Hindu students were punished from taking flowers from the District Commissioners house for Puja.

He was one of the first to call for Bangla as East Pakistan's state language on 30 November 1947, at the Sylhet Kendriya Muslim Sahitya Samsad.

[12] In 1948, being the principal of Azizul Huq College, Bogra, he wrote an essay, 'The State Language of East Pakistan', which was printed in Chaturanga of Kolkata.

He slipped back to India in August 1949, tipped off by a friend, according to Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, that Pakistani authorities intended to arrest him for his vocal support of the Bengali language movement.

[13] After a brief stint at Calcutta University in 1950, he became Secretary of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and editor of its Arabic journal Thaqafatul Hind.

Ali's mother tongue was Bengali and Sylheti, but he also could speak English, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Gujarati, and Pashtu.

[2] Alongside Natya Guru Nurul Momen and Jajabar (Binay Mukhopadhyay), Ali was one of the trail-blazers of a unique category of Bengali writing.

'Ramya Rachana' in the Bengali language, an anecdotal story-telling – often based on real-life experiences – became immensely popular, mostly because of the attractive writing style of Ali.