Najib Ali Choudhury

Najib Ali Choudhury was a 19th-century Bengali Islamic scholar and teacher. He was notable for his founding of the Madinatul Uloom Bagbari, the first madrasa in the Barak Valley region.

Early life and ancestry Choudhury was born to a Bengali Muslim family in the village of Bagbari, near the town of Karimganj, then part of the Sylhet Sarkar of the Mughal Empire's Bengal Subah. His grandfather, Muhammad Naqi, was a local landowner, possessing taluq no. 70 of Egaroshati pargana.

According to a handwritten manuscript by Choudhury's eldest son Abdul Hai Choudhury, the family was descended from Gawhar Khan, a nobleman from Badakhshan. Khan was said to have given up his wealth to his younger brother, and become a da'i in Hindustan, taking with him a handwritten ancestral mus'haf by Mir Husayn (dating to 1056 AH / 1647 CE), gilded by Muhammad Yusuf Ali. The emperor granted him jagirs near the village of Kaliganj, near present-day Karimganj district. Choudhury was among the seventeen families that had emigrated from Sylhet, with other families being that of Syed Bakht Majumdar of Sylhet town, the Mians of Sonatia, the ancestors of Principal Habibur Rahman and the ancestors of Khan Bahadur Mahmud Ali (former Assam minister). Modelled after the recently established Darul Uloom Deoband, it is considered to be the first true madrasa in the Greater Sylhet region, offering a standardised religious education in contrast to the informal institutions which had existed there previously. After his death, his grave became a shrine or Mazar, which is located in what is now Rauthgram, Karimganj district.