Tales from My Bygone Time

About this book

Have you ever felt that life stole from you moments whose value you knew only after it was too late? That cities shed their skin leaving behind souls suspended between what was and what is? This is no mere book folding a bygone time between its covers. It is a real pulse and a message across time, written by a man carrying on his shoulders the burdens of his days and the lightness of his dreams, lighting for us roads we may have passed without truly living them. "Tales from My Bygone Time" is an intimate and honest journey beginning from point zero, where the defenseless human stands before life's fluctuations, carrying in his heart a dedication to the "spiritual father" and the support that never stinted its giving. It is a biography in which melt the harshness of seeking work in the alleys of a noisy city and the aesthetics of the old cafés that were the meeting places of souls and art — like the strains of Iraqi maqam still echoing in memory. In these pages you will meet Rashid Street not as an asphalt road but as a throbbing artery carrying the stories of ordinary people, and you will sit in Umm Kulthum's café. A nostalgic ode to a time when the city had a soul and people had time for one another — and to all that we lost without noticing the moment of loss.