V. Abdur Rahim Biography

Dr. V. Abdur Rahim was an Indian Arabic linguist, Qur'anic scholar, and educator whose three-volume Durus al-Lughah al-Arabiyyah li-Ghayr al-Natiqina Biha — popularly known throughout the English-speaking Muslim world as the 'Madinah Books' or 'Madinah Arabic Course' — has been the foundational Arabic textbook series for non-native speakers for over half a century. Born on 13 April 1933 / 1352 AH in Vaniyambadi, a small town in Tamil Nadu, India (the 'V.' in his name is an abbreviation of his hometown rather than a given name), he taught himself Arabic from his youth, frustrated by the rote conjugation methods of his school, and developed a lifelong conviction that Arabic should be taught through living sentences and contextual immersion.

Abdur Rahim earned his BA in English Language and Literature from Presidency College, University of Madras in 1957, then traveled to Cairo where he completed his MPhil and PhD in Arabic Philology at al-Azhar University; his doctoral dissertation was a critical edition of al-Jawaliqi's al-Mu'arrab on foreign loanwords in Arabic. He taught English in Sudan and served as a special Arabic teacher at the University of Khartoum before joining the Islamic University of Madinah in 1969 at the invitation of Shaykh Ibn Baz, where he developed the Arabic-as-a-foreign-language curriculum that would become his defining contribution. He later served as Director of the Translation Centre at the King Fahd Glorious Qur'an Printing Complex in Madinah, overseeing translations of the Qur'an into multiple languages.

Abdur Rahim authored more than thirty books spanning Arabic pedagogy, Qur'anic linguistics, hadith studies, and Islamic literature, many published through the Islamic Foundation Trust in Chennai. His lifelong project of opening Arabic to non-native learners produced generations of students and teachers across the Muslim world. He died in Madinah on 19 October 2023 / 3 Rabi' al-Thani 1445 at the age of 90 and was buried in Jannat al-Baqi'.