'Awad Salman 'Afif al-Tarimi was a master builder of Tarim, in the Wadi Hadhramaut of southern Yemen, working in the mudbrick tradition that gave the valley its towered towns. He is recorded as the designer of the minaret of the Al-Muhdhar Mosque, raised around 1914 and, at some fifty metres, the tallest earthen structure in the world; the published account notes that he had already carried out many clay lattices and domes before the commission, with the scholar Abu Bakr bin Shihab supervising the work. Beyond that, the record is thin — no dates, no second attributed building. He belongs in this pool because Hadhrami mudbrick architecture is usually presented as anonymous vernacular, and here, unusually, the man who built it is named.
