Selma Al-Radi at work at the Amiriya Madrasa; photo by Qais al-Awqati

In addition to the obituary previously posted, the New York Times has recently published this account of Dr. Selma Al-Radi.

Selma Al-Radi, Restored Historic Madrasa, Dies at 71

By MARGALIT FOX, The New York Times, October 14, 2010

On certain dark nights, as a Yemeni legend tells it, Sultan Amir ibn Abd Al-Wahhab would command his servants to set lanterns in the windows of the Amiriya Madrasa, the ornate palace complex he had commissioned at Rada, in southern Yemen. Then, with his daughter by his side, he would ride into the hills above town, to behold his vast edifice ablaze with light.

The sultan was a historical figure, the last ruler of the Tahirid Dynasty, which flourished in Yemen from the mid-15th to early 16th centuries. The Amiriya Madrasa, erected in 1504 and named for him, was then and is now again one of the great treasures of Islamic art and architecture.

Solidly built of limestone and brick, the Amiriya seemed destined to endure as the sultan’s monumental legacy. But after he was killed in battle in 1517, the complex was left to decay. The more puritanical rulers who followed him deemed its lavishness a distraction from the sober business of prayer.

That the Amiriya today stands resplendent after five centuries of neglect is due almost entirely to the efforts of one woman, the Iraqi-born archaeologist Selma Al-Radi, who was for many years a research associate at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

In an immense undertaking begun in the early 1980s and lasting nearly a quarter-century, Dr. Radi oversaw the return of the complex, brick by brick, to its former glory. What was more, at her direction, the restoration was done using only traditional materials, as well as time-honored construction methods passed down in Yemeni families for generations.

Three stories high and crowned by six large domes, the Amiriya gleams white as sugar against the sepia landscape. Besides a madrasa, or religious school, it comprises a mosque; residential quarters; and a hammam, or bath, equipped with medieval shower stalls.

Inside, the building is a controlled riot of pattern and color. Walls teem with intricate stucco carving that resemble ivory fretwork. On the soaring vaulted ceilings, geometric and floral designs and Koranic inscriptions are painted in tempera, in brilliant hues of red, orange and green.

The Amiriya Madrasa, which reopened in 2005, has received wide coverage in the news media. In 2007, Dr. Radi and her Yemeni colleague Yahya Al-Nasiri were was honored with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Presented every three years, the award honors outstanding architectural achievements throughout the Muslim world.

Dr. Radi died on Oct. 7, at 71. The death, at her home in Manhattan, was of ovarian cancer, her husband, Qais Al-Awqati, said; she also had Alzheimer’s disease.

A diplomat’s daughter, Selma Al-Radi was born in Baghdad on July 23, 1939. Her father was the Iraqi ambassador first to Iran and later to India, and she was reared in Teheran and New Delhi.

Dr. Radi earned a bachelor’s degree from Cambridge in Oriental Studies, with a concentration in archaeology and ancient Semitic languages; a master’s degree in art history and Near East archaeology from Columbia; and a Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of Amsterdam, where she wrote her dissertation on a Neolithic site in Cyprus.

Where some archaeologists are theoreticians, Dr. Radi was a digger, seldom happier than when she had her hands deep in the grit of history. Over the years, she excavated at sites in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Kuwait and Egypt, but it was for her work in Yemen that she would become renowned.

She first saw the Amiriya Madrasa in late 1970s, when she was helping set up the National Museum of Yemen. One day, she traveled to Rada to visit a Dutch archaeological team that was restoring part of the town.

“I saw this building and said, ‘Wow, this we’ve got to save’ ” Dr. Radi told The Guardian of London in 2006. “So I went rushing back to the Dutch embassy and said, ‘Help, help, help.’ ”

By then, the complex was a ruin, with sagging walls, rotting beams and a roof that threatened collapse. Its once-vibrant murals were flaked and faded; its stucco carvings had been obscured by layers of whitewash. The building had long been the de facto town dump, its ground floor filled with the detritus of centuries.

After securing backing from the Dutch and Yemeni governments, Dr. Radi recruited hundreds of local craftsmen. She insisted on traditional materials — baked bricks, mud-and-straw mortar, properly cured local timber — which were both less expensive and more authentic than modern ones like steel and reinforced concrete. (The cost of the entire restoration was about $2 million, a comparatively modest sum for a project of this scale.)

Workers did large tasks like shoring up walls and minute ones like scraping whitewash off the stucco with surgical scalpels, an enterprise that by itself took 15 years. They also revived the lost art of making qudad, a plaster of lime and cinder historically used to waterproof Yemeni buildings.

Because there was no local tradition of painting conservation, an Italian team was brought in to restore the Amiriya’s lavish tempera murals; over time, they trained Yemeni workers in their art.

Today, the Amiriya Madrasa is open to the public apart from hours of prayer; a museum on one floor chronicles the restoration.

Dr. Radi’s first marriage, to Muqbil Zahawi, ended in divorce. Besides her husband, Dr. Awqati, she is survived by a son from her first marriage, Rakan Zahawi; her mother, Suad Muneer Abbas; and a brother, Abbad Al-Radi.

Her publications included two books on the Amiriya Madrasa, “The Amiriya in Rada: The History and Restoration of a Sixteenth-Century Madrasa in the Yemen” (Oxford University, 1997; edited by Robert Hillenbrand) and “Amiriya Madrasa: The Conservation of the Mural Paintings” (Centro di Conservazione Archeologica, 2005; with Roberto Nardi and Chiara Zizola).

In restoring the Amiriya, Dr. Radi did include one nontraditional element: electrical wiring. Now, on many dark nights, the vast edifice is ablaze with light.