Rome was founded in 753 BC. It will be 3000 years old soon, my husband mused the other night, as we trudged up one of the city’s many hills. (There are not seven, there are hundreds.) Three thousand years is not so long, only 30 times older than I am, he continued in the same vein. Born in Dresden in 1918, he has an expansive view of human time. He feels at home in the centuries.

He saw Rome for the first time in 1931 with his grade-school class from the fishing village of Camogli, south of Genoa. He was the only immigrant in his class. Sometimes he wore lederhosen. The local boys threw stones at him and his younger brother, until their father, a German expatriate novelist and premature refugee from Hitler, appealed good naturedly to the local mayor and the assaults ended. In Rome the class of 12-year-olds was taken for an audience with the Pope, who singled out my husband, the lone non-Catholic in the group, for special attention, perhaps because of his cherubic face.

I thought of all this while listening to four Muslim writers give their views on the problems facing Muslim minorities in the U.S. and Italy, at a literary get together organized by our State Department at the Center for American Studies in Rome on May 21. The American participants suffered from varying degrees of presentism, an obsession with the headlines: the war on terror, Islamophobia, Al Qaeda strategizing. The Italian Muslims, more at home in history, brought some spaciousness to the debate.

Algerian novelist Amara Lakhous is only 36, a survivor (although he would abjure that dramatic term) of Algeria’s 1990s dirty war between a corrupt autocracy and hysterical Islamist rebels. Dozens of intellectuals were murdered, while hundreds — thousands — emigrated. Lakhous came to Rome in 1995 to study anthropology and never left. He’s writing a doctoral thesis on the first generation of Arab Muslim immigrants in Italy. For a while after arriving, he supported himself as an interpreter and cultural mediator for Italy’s newest residents, immigrants from China and Latin America and North Africa and Bangladesh, who lived in a low-rent dormitory in the multicultural neighborhood of Piazza Vittorio.

Out of this experience he wrote a charming novel about cross-cultural misunderstandings, first in Arabic (How to be suckled by the wolf without getting bitten, Algiers 2003) and then, as a labor of love for his country of refuge, in Italian. This version, Clash of Civilizations over an elevator in Piazza Vittorio (Edizioni e/o 2006), became a best seller, and won two awards (the Flaiano, named for Fellini’s scriptwriter and the Sciascia, named for the late great Sicilian novelist). A film version is already in the works. Europa Editions, New York, will publish an English translation of the book in 2008.

In the knowing spirit of Italian social comedies of years gone by (Divorce Italian Style, anything starring Alberto Sordi) and with a nod to the Roman classic That Awful Mess on via Merulana, by Carlo Gadda, and the Arab language classic Season of Migration to the North, by Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, Lakhous gently spoofs Italian xenophobia. Suspected of all sorts of crimes by their Roman neighbors, his immigrant narrators are in fact lonely, vulnerable, homesick, and declasse individuals: an Iranian chef who hates pizza; a Peruvian Catholic home attendant whose boyfriends keep sending her to the abortionist; a highly articulate Algerian intellectual reduced, by memories of blood and trauma, to howling like the mythical Roman wolf.

Meanwhile, in the background, Romans, Neapolitans and Milanese badmouth each other in their mutually unintelligible dialects. Italy, an old land but a young nation, a country with its own long history of exile and immigration to foreign lands, is a work in progress. What does integration — that buzz word — mean for immigrants to a country whose identity is still in flux? Could the new immigrants and the born Italians define the country together, in unsuspected ways?

Lakhous is doing his best to make it happen. It was a great relief, at the CAS event, conceived by State Department as a kinder, gentler weapon in the war on terror, to hear him jump clear out of the debate on present dangers, and back into the first milennium A.D., when, as he pointed out, Arabic was the language of Sicily for two centuries. The great Sicilian writer Sciascia’s home town has an Arab name. Racalmuto means “dead village.” Arabic is deeply embedded in the island’s geography. Even after the Norman invasion of Sicily in 1061 (I later read) Muslim culture flourished under Christian protection. Will the 21st century with its killer hatreds, be more medieval than the Middle Ages? Or could history and precedent work in our favor?

Of course if you don’t know the history, it doesn’t help. Lakhous joked about the low standards the Italian media set for experts on Islam. As for journalist Oriana Fallaci‘s best selling tirades against the new Muslim invasion of Europe — by boats and babies — he noted, ambiguously, that the Muslim faith requires that the dead be remembered with clemency. Fallaci is gone, but her anti-Muslim screeds still circulate.

Dante may have consigned the prophet Mohamed to the depths of hell, as a sower of discord, but literary historians see a kinship between his epic stroll through the universe and the work of contemporary Muslim poets. At the CAS last week, Iraqi born scholar and novelist Younis Tawfik recommended Miguel Asin Palacios‘ study Islam and the Divine Comedy. Dante was Tawfik’s bridge to the west. He was a student in Mosul when he read passages from The Divine Comedy in Arabic and was seized with a longing to read the complete original. He left for Italy in 1979 and remained there. Twenty-five years on, as a professor of Arabic at the University of Genoa, a prize winning novelist, and director of the Italo-Arab Cultural Center Dar al Hikma, he finally obtained Italian citizenship. It took a special intervention on the part of then President Ciampi to make it happen, as an outraged Italian journalist informed the audience at the CAS. (Tawfik himself was too polite to complain.) “We need to change our laws,” she insisted, to make citizenship more accessible. Change is in the works apparently, under the current center-left government.

More about that another time.

–Suzanne Ruta

But it might as well be:

A bomb technician discovered that a suspicious package that forced more than 300 workers to evacuate a state building contained a bobblehead doll awarded to public officials for perceived errors.

The Endangered Species Act is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—Fisheries (a.k.a. the National Marine Fisheries Service). They FWS also enforces the Migratory Bird Act. One often hears about their work with endangered owls and eagles and such, but they are trying to protect American hawks and raptors as well, from, for example, Californian clubs for genetically defective tumbling “roller pigeons,” which consider the birds of prey a threat. This story from the FWS site gives some insight into their policing powers:

Federal authorities have charged seven Southern California men associated with “roller pigeon” clubs on charges related to the fatal beatings and shootings of federally protected raptors. Six of the defendants were arrested throughout the day yesterday as part of a nationwide investigation – Operation High Roller – that is targeting roller pigeon owners who believe that hawks and falcons, while protected under federal law, should be killed because they attack pigeons, particularly when they suffer seizures in flight and tumble uncontrollably toward the ground.

The seven cases in Southern California, along with charges filed against defendants in Oregon and Texas, are part of a 14-month investigation by special agents with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. In California, a special agent infiltrated several roller pigeon clubs and learned about members’ efforts to trap and kill raptors, specifically Cooper’s hawks, red-tailed hawks and Peregrine falcons, according to court documents. Investigators estimate that leaders and members of the National Birmingham Roller Club (NBRC) and other enthusiast organizations in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are responsible for killing 1,000 to 2,000 raptors annually. One official of the NBRC claims to have killed as many as 50 raptors annually for the past several years, according to court documents. One defendant told the investigating agent that he had filled a five-gallon bucket with talons that he had cut from slain hawks.

Infiltrating a roller pigeon club sounds like a pretty sweet undercover assignment.

I can’t believe it’s been nearly four years since People Powered Howard kicked things off during that crazy summer in Vermont. And five years tomorrow since Daily Kos was launched.

The Washington Post has a big takeout on two new books on Hillary Clinton that’s kicking up a bit of dust today. The Carl Bernstein book, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, which the Post devotes two-thirds of its story to, sounds like the more explosive and closely held one, which is probably why I was able to obtain a copy of Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta‘s Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, forthcoming from Little, Brown and Company in June, which I started poring through last night.

First things first: this book will not impress you with its narrative flair. Still, Her Way is a perfectly fine delivery system for what information it contains, most of which the Clinton camp is correct to point out to the Post has been reported previously, and whose most provocative allegation has already been denied directly by the source Gerth and Van Natta only quoted second-hand. Reports the Post:

The authors cite a former Bill Clinton girlfriend, Marla Crider, who said she saw a letter on his desk written by Hillary Clinton, outlining the couple’s long-term ambitions, which they called their “twenty-year project.”

Crider was first quoted about the letter in a book by a former National Enquirer reporter in 2000, at the time describing it as more about Bill Clinton’s infidelities and the “little girls” he had. Gerth and Van Natta, however, report that they re-interviewed Crider and that she said the earlier book’s account was “not totally accurate.” In this telling, Crider described the note as being more about the couple’s political plans, with little discussion of their personal relationship.

The authors report that the Clintons updated their plan after the 1992 election, determining that Hillary would run when Bill left office. They cite two people, Ann Crittenden and John Henry, who said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and close Clinton friend, told them that the Clintons “still planned two terms in the White House for Bill and, later, two for Hillary.” Contacted last night, Branch said that “the story is preposterous” and that “I never heard either Clinton talk about a ‘plan’ for them both to become president.”

The Clinton campaign’s attempt to “yawn” off the book doesn’t give you much sense of its actual flavor, which is too bad, because its opening tone is surprisingly nasty. And yes, I know it’s the Clintons we’re talking about, so that nastiness should never come as a shock, but these are Timesmen, of whom I would expect better, even in their private efforts. The introductory chapters are jam-packed with the sort of dated ’90s aspersions that have been mocked into the ground this decade, as just about every hoary anti-Clinton cliche you’ve ever heard — and some you thought were anti-Gore cliches! — is trotted out and applied to events across the span of Clinton’s life. You almost feel bad for the authors for failing to follow the change in the media climate. These tropes are deployed at such regular intervals in the early parts of the book that the effect is ultimately somewhat comical, as in the below, from an early chapter:

Hillary’s commitment to carefully selecting a persona that would suit her best is revealing partly because of the determined and calculating way that she went about it. She wanted to weigh every pro against every con, consider each possibility from every angle. Her letters…show…an almost scientific devotion to self-creation.

A comment on her decision to run for the Senate from New York? Her time in the White House? Or maybe her new quest for the presidency? Nope. None of the above. That’s the authors’ take on Clinton’s sophomore year at Wellesley College. And the book goes on like that. It manages to cast a single, retrospective, cliched interpretation on diverse events across the course of her life. I guess that’s how you sell books — publishers are more likely than newspaper editors to encourage reporters to arrive at conclusions that exceed what their reporting reveals, and that cast a consistent frame on varied material that can be interpreted any number of ways. To be fair, the tone does get more objective and less editorial as the book goes on. There’s less about how she “exaggerate[d] her past accomplishments,” “said one thing and [did] another,” or “left former friends and allies on the side of the road” — and more about the details of her Whitewater transactions and time in the Senate.

Whiskey Fire has more on Gerth’s history with the Clintons, Yglesias mocks the book with appropriate vigor, and non-partisan Marc Ambinder concludes: “It’s hard to imagine we’ll be talking about these books in August.”

–Crossposted from Tapped.

And GFR tries to find the time to. The Writers Read blog is good fun.