'Dialas in His Hands' isn't a traditional biography of an individual but rather the story of the Dialas River, with its extraordinary legends, mystical springs, trembling offerings, roaring violence, deceptive calm, and anticipated floods. It also follows the fate of a nine-year-old boy who gathers in his mind magic, cunning, intoxication, innocence, and madness as weapons to face the world. He immerses himself in the blue waters of his river, gazing towards the distant springs of Dialas, dreaming of reaching them in a sublime pilgrimage, reflecting to himself: 'How I wish to return to the places of my childhood and youth to revive the memory of the child I used to be.' Fifty years separate me from the life of this child. My God, how quickly life passes like a fleeting blink. I hesitated before the difficulty of the task, but my mother encouraged me, saying, 'No one can document the book of your childhood except you. If you don't, those years would be lost.' Perhaps it was my mother who drove this writing, not because she is the natural author who provides me with ideas but because she is the last living witness to my stories, the mirror through which I see my childhood. Thus, I began to envision Adam, the child, as a lover of paradise and trembling from fire, and soon found myself before a project that extended into my whole life formed by three entities: Dialas, Baghdad, and Paris, three beacons illuminating my path wherever I go and three legends igniting my mind whenever I think. This formed a narrative trilogy that could symbolize the ascent of the human self to the sources of the sacred Dialas River, with all its magic, cunning, intoxication, innocence, and madness. The events of each part of this trilogy happened in one of these three cities, thus they can be read separately or together. Will this trilogy, perhaps, fulfill the dual vision for that young writer who encountered the saying: that the event becomes written and the written becomes an event?

• Publishing house: Dar Al-Farabi for Publishing and Distribution
• Number of Pages: 280
• Year of publication: 2007