In "Is Newt Gingrich Wrong to Talk About Sharia?" in Pajamas Media (via [1] RaymondIbrahim.com), August 24, our friend Raymond Ibrahim discusses whether Sharia, as Lee Smith recently characterized it, is a "hopelessly abstract concept":

In a recent article appearing in [2] Tablet, Lee Smith takes former House speaker Newt Gingrich to task for the latter's [3] focus on sharia (i.e., Islamic law). The thrust of Smith's argument is that sharia is a "hopelessly abstract concept" and "a highly idealized version of reality that has little basis in fact"; that sharia is "a catchall phrase for legal principles that have rarely, if ever, existed in actual Muslim societies"; and that "the notion that something called 'sharia' was widely imposed throughout the lands of Islam is an Orientalist fantasy."

My first observation is -- even if all these charges were perfectly true -- so? It hardly matters what sharia really is; all that matters is what today's Muslims believe it is. And a great many believe sharia is tangible and codified, and that it can, and should, be implemented in society. More to the point, telling the apostate or adulteress -- who are regularly executed "according to sharia"-- that they are really being murdered by "principles that have rarely, if ever, existed in actual Muslim societies," is hardly reassuring.

Smith does acknowledge Islam's famous draconian punishments; he just prefers to call them hudud, and limits them to "Islamist outfits like the Taliban." Similarly, Smith offers a blitz tour on Islamic jurisprudence -- including the Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki, and Shafi'i madhahib, the differences between usuli and akhbari, fiqh, ijma, 'aql, qiyas, and ahkam sultaniyya -- even as the reader wonders how these concepts are relevant to the discussion at hand: Islam in America, from a national security context....

[4] Read it all.