It was his delight on seeing the twin towers crumple that made Princeton-educated Changez a fundamentalist in Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. He admits to being, after all, “remarkably pleased” by 9/11.

Hamid’s superbly successful novel is only a confirmation of how 9/11 has made the word ‘fundamentalist’ a tautological term that, in every which way, is applied to every Muslim critic of America.

If one is a Muslim, and is critical of American policies, keeps a beard (that according to Sunni Islam must fit in his fist), guided by a commitment to his religion, and prefers the sharia, or Islamic traditional law, to guide some aspects of his life, he must be a “fundamentalist”.

It’s an irony that a term most notably and almost always applied to Muslims these days has roots not in Islam but American Protestant Christianity. A religious movement dating back to 1900s in the United States, fundamentalism was a conservative Protestant reaction against 20th-century modernism.

Fundamentalism is also applied to Orthodox Jews, Sikhs and even nationalist movements, such as the Tamil insurgency. However, from a post-9/11 Western perspective, the most frequently identified form of fundamentalism has been Islamic fundamentalism. (Understanding Terrorism: Analysis of Sociological and Psychological Aspects, Click here for Amazon page)

Fundamentalism is today the principal narrative is which Islam is presented and interpreted and frequently evaluated in pejorative terms. As the Lionel Caplan edited Studies in Religious Fundamentalism notes, it is seen as a “problem for the West”, radical and extremist.

The vast majority of Islamic fundamentalists, to me, are people who believe in the fundamentals of their religion, the Muslim faith. There can be no Islam without the five fundamentals: Shahada, or the testimony of one God; Salat or five daily prayers; Saum, or the month-long fasting during Ramadan; Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca; and Zakat, or compulsory charity. In this way, I’m an Islamic fundamentalist, like millions of my co-believers.

A new Pew Research Center survey of Muslims around the globe found that most Muslims remain genuinely tied to their faith.

Most of the respondents surveyed in 39 countries felt Islamic teachings should not just guide their personal lives but also form the basis of the societies they live in. According to its findings, Muslims also felt that religious leaders may have some kind of influence over political matters.

Although surveys can be grossly misleading and never adequate in fully explaining attitudes, the Pew findings suggest that Muslims aren’t fully prepared to embrace a society in which Islamic values play no role at all. They are happy to remain within a broader Islamic ethos, out of respect for their culture and way of life.

Islam isn’t readily compatible with modernity and its abiding features, such as free markets, capitalism, liberalism and freedoms. No religion is. Yet, there is a case for, and possibility of, reconciling Islam within a modern political framework.

Meanwhile, Mira Nair, who turned Hamid’s novel into a beautiful motion picture I watched last weekend, got a taste of how fundamentalism — as Professor Lionel Caplan of SOAS notes — isn’t just religious. It could be applied to the doggedness and hysteria of airport security we see these days.

I read this story of what happened as Nair prepared to take a flight out of New York recently. Her bangles set off a security alarm and the frenzied guards searched her thoroughly. Nair was jittery, as she had to make conference call to India at 6 in the morning (NY time).

What kind of a conference call at 6 in the morning, the puzzled security officer asked her. Nair gave him some global lessons. “There are other countries in the world, sir. And there are other time zones.”

“Can you tell the Muslim people their lives are as precious as our lives? Can you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA?” well-known anti-drone campaigner and founder of Code Pink group Medea Benjamin yelled at President Obama, interrupting him twice earlier, as he delivered a major counter-terror policy speech in Washington.

Twice, Obama managed to quiet the woman, as he pleaded her to let him finish. Benjamin yielded. She said she kept waiting to hear about changes that would represent a “significant shift in policy”. “Unfortunately, I heard nice words, not the resetting of failed policies.” That’s when she burst out. Medea Benjamin escorted out of Obama speech

In his long speech, Obama signaled a narrowing down of the war on terror, closing of Gitmo and limiting the use of drones — not abandoning them. Although there was much to appreciate in the new speech, the problem is that Obama speaks more than Obama does.

According to the New America Foundation data, in Pakistan alone, 3,336 people have been killed by these remote controlled skybombs since 2003. Many of these are believed to be unintended targets. They represent the most unspeakable of crimes. They are, without doubt, targeted killing.

The UN is already probing the impact of drone strikes on civilians. Ben Emmerson QC, the lawyer leading the probe, told BBC that drones represented “a real challenge to the framework of international law”.

Obama acknowledged this in his speech. “And yet as our fight enters a new phase, America’s legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be the end of the discussion. To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance.”

It was good to hear the president speak openly on the drones and its impact on civilian casualty. Obama owes an explanation on why drones should be a weapon of choice – his administration, according to a Boston Globe article, is believed to have launched about 300 drone strikes, five times more than under George W. Bush.

There’s no legal and moral justification for the use of such a secretive weapon that goes unaccounted. The secrecy of the drone programme allows little fair estimate of how many civilians have been killed in Pakistan and Yemen, for example.

Obama also expressed remorse – for the first time – about innocents killed by drones. “For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Yet it was shocking to hear Obama defend, however, the use of drones where “no alternative” was possible. The president needs to come up with more clear-cut details on how he plans to limit the drone programme or limit civilian casualties

Benjamin couldn’t have been clear enough on how Obama has been against all that he promised 9 years ago. She wrote on Common Dream website:

“While I have received a deluge of support, there are others, including journalists, who have called me “rude.” But terrorizing villages with Hellfire missiles that vaporize innocent people is rude. Violating the sovereignty of nations like Pakistan is rude. Keeping 86 prisoners in Guantanamo long after they have been cleared for release is rude. Shoving feeding tubes down prisoners’ throats instead of giving them justice is certainly rude.”

Was it a premature Nobel? The president doesn’t seem to have achieved half of what people think he is capable of. As Obama walked into the White House, my excitement was about the possibility of being part of a historic generation which, under the Obama presidency, could see a huge ship turn around and change course. Just as another generation had seen the Cold War end or the two Germanys become one. I thought progress would be made on Palestine, that diplomats would be given the upperhand in solving the mess in Afghanistan, that Guantanamo would be closed down and that the War on Terror would be fought in a more effective but less hysterical way. Unfortunately, I don’t see American foreign policy changing much.

I remember discussing some of these outcomes with Vali Nasr, now the dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University. We spent considerable time talking politics when he was in Delhi for the Hindustan Times Summit a few years ago.

Nasr, a former senior adviser to the office of Obama’s Special Representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, or SRAP, stunned the State Department in March when excerpts of his new book, The Dispensable Nation, were published in the Foreign Policy magazine.

Nasr tells us that Obama ignored critical advice from his Special Representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the late Richard Holbrooke, the broker of Dayton peace accord that ended the Balkans war. Holbrooke knew that the gargantuan counterinsurgency and military offensives wouldn’t work. The Taliban were too entrenched to be wiped out and that Afghanistan’s official administration and government too mired in corruption. Holbrooke wanted “reconciliation” to be made the cornerstone of a wider strategy involving not just the Afghan conflict but also that of Pakistan and Iran.

The White House didn’t agree, Nasr says, because this would make Obama look “soft”. Nasr says Obama is too concerned with satisfying public opinion to take strategic decisions. Nasr, an expert on Iran, also feels that the Obama administration, for all its talk of giving diplomacy a chance, hasn’t given Iran the real sops that could get it to stop enriching uranium.

Some recent analyses, including Nasr’s, point to an Obama pursuing Bush-era policies under a silver tongue. Too concerned with public image and too mindful of critics. Obama should be aiming at leaving a mark on global politics, not America’s alone. It seems he may fall short on both. More worryingly, the president has relied on the show of American force on most issues of his presidency, rather than on diplomacy. That doesn’t quite make him a dove, as James Traub wrote in a Wall Street Journal review of Nasr’s new book.

Two lines, in my opinion, stand out as the profoundest words ever spoken on the Mahatma.

First, Einstein, in 1944, said generations might not believe that a great man like Gandhi ever “walked upon this earth”. Second, Orwell’s 1949 piece on Gandhi opens with a rational probe: “Saints should always be judged guilty until proved innocents…” In the end, Orwell gracefully exonerates Gandhi: “…how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind.”

A fair amount of questioning of Gandhi’s ideas has gained currency among western writers, who see him as self-conceitedly left-leaning, and as disavowing industrial progress for bucolic poverty. “The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed,” Mahatma Gandhi famously said. Some of Gandhi’s greatest challengers were, however, compatriots of his time – Jinnah, Savarkar and Ambedkar.

With his new book, “Faith and Freedom, Gandhi in History”, Prof. Mushirul Hasan, the internationally renowned historian and former vice-chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, turns his gaze to an intriguing aspect of Gandhi’s life and legacy: his engagement with Muslims. Intriguing, because Gandhi’s overly ‘drift’ towards Muslims is said to have cost him his life, when a Hindu militant assassinated him in 1948. Why could Gandhi not mitigate the ferment of Muslim nationalism that culminated in the creation of Pakistan?

Hasan acknowledges Gandhi’s immense love for Muslims. Once, in jail, he anxiously stuck his neck out – you may choose to ignore the pun — for a glimpse of the Eid moon, along with some Muslim inmates. Gandhi enjoyed great personal rapport with Muslim leaders but, Hasan argues, he had a “limited or a specific understanding” of Islam. It was shaped by his early experience of the mercantile South African and the Gujarati Muslim community. His approach would later lead him to a “dead end”.

What made Gandhi ‘Gandhi’ was his faith, the bedrock of his ideas. His ‘moral heroism’ was inherently anti-secular. So, for him, the unhindered rise of Islam had to do with its normative messages of “equality, tolerance and simplicity”, as found in the chapters 5.48 and 11.118 of the Quran, which also enjoins People of the Book to work for common good (3.64). This is exactly what Gandhi’s faith told him; his concepts rooted in religious scruples. Where else have some of the greatest ideas of mankind, such as justice, compassion and righteousness, come from, but religion?

Much as he was a bulwark against colonial nationalism, Gandhi could not assuage inter-communal rivalry because of one community’s suspicion of being dominated by the other. As one who views the world not from the “prism of faith” and opposed as he is to Muslim sectarianism, Hasan explores these as Gandhian infirmities.

However, if Gandhi failed in successfully repressing Muslim nationalism, it is because Hindu fundamentalism had also been concomitantly rising. The Mahatma’s battle was spiritual; Jinnah’s and Savarkar’s were temporal.

Savarkar felt Hindus were losing out and Ambedkar succeeded in pulling Dalits out of Hinduism’s fold, much to Gandhi’s annoyance. Gandhi could not prevent the Partition – he supported a newly formed Pakistan’s rights – not because of his flaws, but that of others. This concession has to be made for whom Romain Rolland called “a mortal demi-god”.

An essential Everyman historian, Hasan writes history with flourish. “Faith and Freedom” is a tale told to make history vivid, amid his fine intellectual tradition suffused with secularism, in the Western liberal sense.

Hasan’s speaks from a position of western liberal secularism, where religious values are derided. That makes Gandhi’s relationship with Muslims posthumously look like a disaster in parts. That western concept of secularism does not work for India.

Although open-house debates between presumptive prime ministers facing an election were sought to be introduced, albeit unsuccessfully, by the BJP’s LK Advani in 2009, it looks like the idea would really be put to test in 2014.

Already, it’s being billed as Narendra Modi (Narendra Modi: A controversial leader has ambitions to be India’s next prime minister) versus Rahul Gandhi (Rahul Gandhi Really Doesn’t Want PM Job) during next year’s general election.

Rahul Gandhi’s roadmap for his own role in government is largely hazy; he denies he wants to be India’s prime minister (although he hasn’t said he doesn’t want to be prime minister ever).

Manmohan Singh, who could be over-rated as an economist but under-rated as a politician, talked his way out recently on being asked if was keen on a third term as PM.

So, just as the nation was once left asking “after Nehru, who?” in 1964, the year Nehru died, the “who next” question once again hangs over the Congress like a puzzle.

Modi is effectively working the media and crowds up, moving from state to state in well set-up forums from where he is actually projecting himself as a presumptive prime minister, but there is less agreement – as of now — about him inside his party, the BJP, than in the media. I’m sure about that.

For a fact, the BJP has not once said Modi would be its candidate for PM. I first heard the story – you guessed it – on television discussions.

In the run-up, a positive bias for Modi has crept into the mainstream media, partly because of the UPA’s disarray and Modi’s own efficient campaign.

Modi’s status of being the pointsman of India’s financial elite has only helped. Coverage has been largely agreeable to Modi and critical of Rahul.

Take for instance, the reaction to Rahul’s recent speech to the Confederation of Indian Industry, as opposed to Modi’s address at FICCI, another industry forum.

Rahul’s speech wasn’t appreciated because it was seen short on solutions. I, for one, think Rahul did give a broad solution, if India is to be truly a successful nation.

Progress must be shared and inclusive, he said, which is to say that everybody must benefit from economic progress.

Can there be a bigger answer for India, still home to one of the world’s poorest population?

The real problem I see in Rahul is that he is neither young nor new in politics anymore. So, if he is to effectively lead the Congress, let alone the country, he must be done with his political internship.

Learning about the complexities of this nation’s politics is of course a never-ending pursuit. However, Rahul will have to demonstrate convincingly that he understands politics and is a vote catcher.

He failed in what was a test case for him: the recent UP elections. A good fisherman must catch fish.

However, to be fair to Rahul, today’s elections are no longer about a top-down approach, where a single person can generate enough goodwill to garner 200-plus seats.

There was a time when Congress candidates would just wait for Indira Gandhi to descend from a helicopter, wave her hand and help them win elections.

That era of centralized politics is over. There weren’t as many regional forces then as today.

Election outcomes are shaped by complex issues, such as caste, performance while in power, anti-incumbency, inflation so on and so forth.

And Rahul isn’t articulate enough. Articulation is critical because politics is about talking in and out of situations. It is to speeches that masses react. However, I do not doubt Rahul’s intentions, the way the centre-right cruelly does.

The media were at best naïve to expect the quick fixes and sure-shot answers to our biggest problems: corruption, tax evasion, poverty, increasing gap between rich and poor and, of course, a bottomed-out economy. The media’s attitude during Rahul speech was curious: ‘If he spoke, he must give clinical solutions’.

Modi, however, did offer solutions. Here’s how to curb tax evasion: hire a few clowns, paint them up to make them look like attention-catching jokers, and marching to the sound of drums, dispatch them to the homes of tax cheaters to publicly name and shame them. Modi said this was how he clamped on tax cheaters in Ahmedabad. Is he serious?

We need to be critical of all politicians vying for power, but we aren’t asking some obvious questions to Modi. Exactly what is Modi seeking to trumpet, when Gujarat isn’t the top state in terms of private investment, (it’s Maharashtra)? Nor is Gujarat the topper as far as per capita income goes.

Goa is, followed by Delhi and then Haryana. At the same time, Gujarat has one of poorest social indicators to which I referred in an earlier blog.

Even so, it would have been equally unfair and idiotic to have expected Modi to provide serious solutions to gargantuan issues in a talk show. Both occasions – Rahul’s speech and Modi’s — should have been about assessing their broader approach to politics and economy.

However, the media would do well to ask some questions to Modi which they haven’t been. I list out some probables.

Isn’t it the case that he plays up his big chimera of big industry and investment, while downplaying more dark chapters of poor social progress? How far does his economic showmanship match actual track records

(Gujarat, the gateway to India: fact or farce?)? What does he make of the BJP’s declining share of rural votes? What is the consensus in the BJP over his presumed candidature for the PM’s post?

Why have minorities who were victims of the 2002 riots still not been recompensed? Why did he refuse a skullcap presented to him as an honour by a Muslim? Doesn’t he believe in multi-faith?

And most importantly, how will Modi reconcile himself to the indispensable and inherent idea of an India that doesn’t presage one type of cultural ethos over all others?

I have no qualms in arguing that if we aren’t posing these questions to Modi, then we are going harsh on Rahul, but soft on Modi.

Miller felt one sandwich short of a picnic when she wasn’t allowed to be a fighter pilot, despite being a member of the Israeli air force. She wanted to scramble war jets.

One day, Israeli president Ezer Weizman, the commander of the air force and a combat pilot himself, finally came on the phone, calling Miller a “cutie pie” – a “meidaleh”, literally “young woman” in Yiddish, but in a patronizing way.

In Israel, women couldn’t be combat pilots, he said, quite simply, because they were women. Therefore, Miller had better stayed home.

Weizman was mistaken. Miller wasn’t a “cutie pie”, but a tough nut. She sued, successfully, the Israel Defence Forces in the Supreme Court for not allowing women to take the air force pilot-training exams on grounds of gender, paving the way for them to serve as frontline pilots in one of the world’s most sophisticated air forces.

Why should only men get to be fighter pilots? Miller asked. The top court agreed. In Israel, military service is compulsory for both men and women, with women making up a third of the conscripts.

Two decades on, Miller shifted base to India, settling down in Shivanandi, a small hamlet in the craggy Himalayas, after falling in love and marrying her Indian rafting coach, Shalabh Gahlaut.

The Gahlauts founded the Shivanandi River Lodge by the Alaknanda river, a white-water maelstrom, five hours northeast of Rishikesh on the Badrinath highway in Uttarakhand. “It is some kind of a higher calling,” Miller tells HT.

As life stories go, Miller underwent a transformation. She doesn’t care much about fighter planes these days. She abhors urban life, adores bucolic backyards and, of course, the Himalayas.

A successful woman, for Miller, is not to be found in cockpits, but in Himalayan villages. They work hard in the fields and raise decent families. “Men just play cards,” she says.

Women are better off in rural India, she argues. Miller gave birth to both her daughters — Shanti and Maya – at home. She is now helping traditional Indian midwives called “daees” to improve their skills.

Miller’s Gandhian and distinctly leftist predilections stem from her rural roots: she is a “kibbutznik” from Hukok, near Israel’s Sea of Galilee.

Famed Israeli “kibbutzim” — borne out of a socialist, utopian movement now threatened by modernization — are collectively-owned farms, where profits are equally shared. They are about love of farming, toil and economic equality.

Kibbutzim started off when enterprising Eastern European Jews, 1910 onwards, moved to the Ottoman-ruled Jordan Valley and began building egalitarian, agrarian communities.

“I don’t think many Indians realize what they have got – a strikingly beautiful country,” Miller says.

Miller is now planning to pick a new battle by joining Israeli politics. Her goal: an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. War in Israel is hyped up, she says. “You don’t feel the conflict until you turn on the television or begin serving in the military.”

The world’s most stubborn conflict, Miller says, could be easily solved. “You need just one Gandhi. I want to take Gandhi to Israel.”

Alice Miller, 41, lives a bucolic life in a Himalayan hamlet, swears by the mountains and hates being in cities.