The village was located in a hilly region at the eastern edge of the central coastal plain. A secondary road linked it to a highway to the north that connected Gaza to the highway between Ramla and Jerusalem. Sajad was one of the first villages to benefit from the construction of a railway system in Palestine. In August of 1892 train service between Jaffa and Jerusalem was initiated on a line constructed for the Ottoman government by a French railway company; the train stopped in Sajad. 
The land cultivated by the villagers was originally owned by the Ottoman sultan 'Abd al-Hamid but was taken from him by the Ottoman government in 1908. It was classified as jiftlik land and was owned henceforth by the government but leased on a long-term basis to the inhabitants. In the early 1930s the Mandate government went to court in an effort to prove that the tenants had no hereditary rights to continue leasing the land (which in this case amounted to little more than paying taxes and registration fees on it). Apparently the government's case was vindicated, which may account for the categorization of all village land as 'public' in the census of 1945.
The village's entire population was Muslim. Sajad had no school of its own, but in 1945-46 it began to send its students to a school in Qazaza, a neighboring village to the southeast. The houses of the village were built with reused materials taken from the remains and foundations of earlier settlements on the same site.
