The Passive Voice in the Past Tense
When reporting on local news or events, we often focus on the action rather than the person who did it—whether because the doer is unknown, unimportant, or deliberately concealed. To express "was stolen" or "was demolished," Arabic uses the passive voice (المبني للمجهول).
For basic past tense verbs, you do not need a new vocabulary word to form the passive voice. Instead, you simply change the internal short vowels of the active verb. The first letter takes a damma (ُ) and the middle root letter takes a kasra (ِ).
The active pattern فَعَلَ becomes the passive pattern فُعِلَ. Even when written in everyday texts without the short vowel marks, context and sentence structure usually make it clear that the verb is passive.
Gender Agreement in the Passive Voice
In a passive sentence, the direct object of the action is promoted to become the new grammatical subject. As a result, the passive verb must agree with this new subject in gender.
If the person or thing receiving the action is feminine, you simply attach the standard feminine past tense ending (ـت) to the passive verb to make the pattern فُعِلَت.
Negating the Passive Voice
Just like regular past tense verbs, you can negate a passive past tense verb by placing the particle ما directly before it to indicate that an action was not done.
Reporting Sequences of Events
Because passive verbs are so common in journalism and incident reports, you will frequently see them chained together using conjunctions to describe a sequence of events.