Mohamed Saleh Makiya (Baghdad 1914 – London 2015) was among the first Iraqis to qualify formally as an architect, taking a degree at Liverpool in 1941 and a Cambridge doctorate in 1946 on climate and architecture in the Mediterranean. Back in Baghdad he opened Makiya Associates, and in 1959 founded Iraq's first school of architecture at the University of Baghdad, serving as its dean until 1968. His work is a sustained argument that the vocabulary of Islamic building — the arch, the courtyard, the brick surface, the muqarnas — could carry modern programmes without becoming pastiche. Offices in Bahrain, Muscat and London followed, and after falling out of favour with the Ba'athist regime in the early 1970s he practised from exile, ending with the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat.
