In the year 1332 of the Hijra — 1914 of the common era — the scholar Abu Taher Muhammad Yunus opened the doors of a small house of teaching in the town of Brahmanbaria. The first teacher he appointed was Motiur Rahman; the first students sat in a modest room, with the classical books of grammar and jurisprudence between them. The institution, in time, would take the founder's own name.
The decision was its own kind of independence. Across British India the Deobandi movement — born at Darul Uloom Deoband in 1866 — had begun to weave a quiet network of Qawmi madrasas: community-funded, government-free, devoted entirely to the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the sciences of the Arabic tongue. Yunusia became one of Bengal's earliest, and most enduring, outposts of that movement.
A century later the seal of the institution still bears, in Arabic, the words it was built upon — إِنَّمَا أَنَا قَاسِمٌ وَاللَّهُ يُعْطِي. I am only a distributor; the giving is from Allah. A scholar's humility, set into the foundation stones.
A name carried forward
Independent biographical material on the founder remains scarce. He is not the same person as Haji Muhammad Yunus Choudhury, who would later found Befaqul Madarisil Arabia Bangladesh in 1978. Abu Taher Muhammad Yunus is remembered through the institution he left behind, and through the long line of teachers who taught in his name. Bengali sources name him simply as أبو طاهر محمد یونس — founder — beneath whose memory the madrasa has continued, uninterrupted, since 1914.
Every fact on this page has been cross-checked against the English & Bengali Wikipedia, Banglapedia, The Daily Star, Ali Riaz's Faithful Education (Rutgers, 2008), and a 2021 University of Dhaka thesis on Hadith studies in Bengali. Anything we could not verify — including precise dates for the founder — is left unclaimed.
