Abdur Rahim

He was born into a highly educated family of Bengal, the son of Mawlawi Abdur Rab, a zamindar of Midnapore district ¹. Educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at the Inns of Court in England, he became a barrister of the Calcutta High Court in 1890 ¹. On 20 July 1908 he was appointed a judge of the Madras High Court, served on the Royal Commission on the Public Services in India of 1912–1915, and went on to become Chief Justice of the Madras High Court and Tagore Professor of Law at the University of Calcutta ¹. He was knighted in 1919 ¹.

While still a Madras judge he gave a series of lectures at Calcutta published as The Principles of Muhammadan Jurisprudence according to the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali Schools, a work comparing Islamic and European principles of jurisprudence ¹. He was a member of the Senate and Syndicate of the University of Madras and one of those who promoted the foundation of Maulana Azad College ¹.

Entering politics, he sat on the Bengal Executive Council and served as the province's Administrator of Justice and Allied Subjects from 1921 to 1925, and was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India in 1925 ¹. In December 1925 and January 1926 he chaired the seventeenth session of the All-India Muslim League at Aligarh, arguing in his presidential address that Hindus and Muslims formed two distinct communities of peoples ¹. In 1926 he presided over the All-India Mohammadan Educational Conference and argued for the use of Urdu among all Indian Muslims ¹. From 1935 to 1945 he presided over the Central Legislative Assembly of India ¹.

No fetched text names a school for Abdur Rahim himself, and Wikidata records his religion as Islam only ². His treatise expounds all four Sunni schools of law, but writing a school's jurisprudence is scholarship, not adherence, and his Muslim League leadership is political office; neither settles a personal school, so the museum's data record leaves it unknown.

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