• A routine incursion to make arrests in a refugee camp outside Ramallah led to a firefight that caused two Palestinian deaths and five IDF injuries. [DPA/Haaretz]

• There was also a brief exchange of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, though no one was injured. Each side blames the other for starting it. [AP/WP]

• The housing protests in Jerusalem have shaken society, galvanized the left, and depending on your point of view revealed either how well the question of security has been taken care of for Israelis or how poorly it has been swept under the rug. [NYT]

• Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan sat alone at the table—usually he is flanked by generals—following last week’s military resignations, in a symbol of his new authority over his country’s armed forces. [AP/WP]

• The guy who basically started the anti-sharia meme, many years ago, is a Hasidic lawyer named David Yerushalmi. [NYT]

And that is exactly what the president did in his Arab Spring speech. Repeatedly invoking the mantle of universal values, staging a dogged defense of “inalienable rights,” and enlisting the righteous historical forces of the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, Obama set forth an idealistic path in such a resolute manner that conservatives, unable to control their nostalgic impulses, could not help but observe that the president was sounding more and more like his predecessor George W. Bush. With one big difference, that is: Whereas the former president—by his own admission—was a “gut player” who had primarily relied upon his instincts to formulate ideals, Obama, the former law professor, has always counted much more on the power of ideas.

A closer look at his new ideas, however, reveals a distressing philosophical flaw. Framed by two seminal rhetorical exhibitions—the Cairo speech of June 2009 and the State Department speech last month—the evolution of Obama’s approach to the Arab world continues to oscillate between diametrically opposed philosophical polarities that cannot be adequately resolved. The first one, as laid out in Cairo, espouses a multicultural engagement with the world that embraces an array of separate but equal values. The second, so eloquently displayed two weeks ago, subtly discards this same multicultural bent only to replace it with a categorical reaffirmation of “universal rights.” The unbridgeable logical gap that divides these two speeches—and their binary perspectives about what constitutes truth—also reflects the fundamental philosophical contradiction underpinning the president’s unfolding Middle East strategy: How do you convincingly stand up for a set of universal values while at the same time denying the legitimacy of their universalism?

***

Obama’s memorable speech at Al-Azhar University in Cairo two years ago this week was one of the most humble, respectful, and ultimately unavoidable foreign policy speeches ever given by an American president. In Obama’s undisguised attempt to herald “a new beginning” with Islam and disassociate his presidency from the stained legacy of his predecessor—the controversial war in Iraq that Bush initiated—Obama departed from Bush’s unwavering belief in the supreme virtue of American values. Instead of extolling freedom and democracy, Obama offered elaborate accolades for Islam that were essentially meant to afford it a similar moral and historical legitimacy to our own ideals—suggesting that while Western and Islamic values may differ, they were still equally valid.

In discussing the need for governments that “reflect the will of the people,” Obama conceded in Cairo that “each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people,” and added that “there is no straight line to realize this process,” before clarifying that “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone” and insisting that “no system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other.” The philosophical implications of the speech were quite evident: By acknowledging that each nation produces its own set of principles according to its own particular circumstances, Obama was also admitting that there was ultimately no single criterion with which to evaluate multiple systems of value and meaning. In other words, he was implying that we could agree to disagree on the normative solutions to existential questions, since none of us actually possess the right answers.

It is not surprising that such a flexible philosophical approach spurred conservative critics to accuse the president of multiculturalism and to accordingly label him an “illiberal multicultural relativist.” For all the lingering ambiguity and confusion that such terms continue to generate, they do share an unequivocal repudiation of the universal legitimacy—and supremacy—of Western Enlightenment thought and its inherent beliefs in individual freedom, political equality, secularism, and democratic government. And although Obama has always acted in a nuanced manner that defies easy ideological labeling, his carefully crafted Cairo speech and the correspondingly deferential rhetoric he has chosen to use when engaging the Arab world suggest that he has shared to some extent in this repudiation—at least until recently.

What makes the Arab Spring speech remarkable is the fact that the president’s previous sympathies for the “common principles” that America shares with Islamic and Arab cultures seemed to dissipate beneath a resounding rhetorical defense of the universal legitimacy of Western ideals. Although still emphasizing that the Unites States “must proceed with a sense of humility” and conceding that “not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy,” Obama steadfastly avowed that “we can and we will speak out for a set of core principles,” explicitly declaring that “the United States supports a set of universal rights”—a historically fraught term that had been conspicuously absent from the Cairo speech. The president’s repeated references to “universal rights,” “inalienable rights,” and “the self-determination of individuals,” as well as the sanctity of women’s rights and religious freedom, were all aimed at reaffirming the universal validity—and moral superiority—of core Western values.

Obama also chose to conjure the experiences of 1776 and the Civil Rights era last week and to quote that timeless Jeffersonian line that historically unites them—“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” By declaring that the core American values indeed constitute “self-evident truths,” Obama was essentially also implying that anything contradictory must necessarily be false.

Rather than display a philosophical coherence or even a theoretical consistency, what these carefully divergent speeches suggest is a fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of the president’s emerging Middle East strategy. The multicultural tones of the Cairo speech and the undeniable universalism proudly exhibited last month are not complementary or symbiotic but rather competing. If you indeed believe that equal rights for women are indisputable, you cannot then concede that patriarchal cultural traditions that deny these rights are still legitimate. Alternatively, if you espouse that there is nothing more sacred than individual self-determination then there is no logical approach that allows you to endorse the validity of legal institutions that outlaw the sexual expression of that individuality by severely penalizing acts of homosexuality, as is the norm throughout the Arab world. Finally, if you contend that religious freedom is paramount, you cannot respect or even acknowledge the legitimacy of religious traditions that attempt to brutally subordinate—and eliminate—alternative beliefs, as is currently happening in Egypt, where Coptic Christians are increasingly being assailed by radical Muslims. The broader problem, put simply, is that if you advocate the universal values of Western Enlightenment—which the president clearly did in the Arab Spring speech—you have to then be willing to stand firmly behind everything that these values entail while at the same time explicitly repudiating anyone who attempts to undermine them.

Although the postmodern awakening of the late 1960s that bred multiculturalism may have opened our eyes to injustices latent within Western societies and altered the way in which we have come to engage questions of race, gender, and ethnicity, its continuing hold on the American political imagination may severely hinder the Obama Administration’s success in ushering in the ambitious transformation he described last month, from the Middle East “as it is” to the Middle East “as it should be.”

As the Arab Spring continues to consolidate and expand, the pressures placed upon the United States to take a stand and pick a side will inevitably only mount. At some point, the president will have to halt his juggling act and decide whether certain values are not just preferable but superior to others. It is one thing to respect the religious and cultural traditions from which Sharia law, Arab tribal identity, and patriarchal authority have sprouted. But once these traditions begin to threaten the vitality and sustenance of the very freedoms and rights that this Arab Spring is attempting to secure—and they will—Obama won’t be able to continue to maintain his unstable balancing act between universalism and multiculturalism. If there is any chance of transcending the sordid status quo and creating a new Middle East, the president must also be ready to unapologetically admit that there are still many things that the Arab world can—and must—be willing to learn from us.

Stealthy jihadis and violent ones, said Gingrich, are “both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of sharia.” After quoting the Gettysburg Address, Gingrich concluded, “I would argue that the victory of sharia would clearly mean the end of the government Lincoln was describing.”

You’d think the party of Lincoln was made of stronger stuff, but many on the right have taken up the former Georgia congressman’s call to arms. Gingrich, wrote Andrew McCarthy on National Review Online, “has crystallized the essence of our national-security challenge. Henceforth, there should be no place to hide for any candidate, including any incumbent. The question will be: Where do you stand on sharia?”

By making sharia the focus of his fulminations, Gingrich has taken an almost hopelessly abstract concept and weighted it with an existential presence that it has never had in 1,400 years of Muslim history. Sharia is not a concrete legal code; it is the idealized notion of God’s law. Because there is no way to approach what is ostensibly divine except through human agency, sharia as such does not exist except as interpreted by human beings over the long course of Islamic history. The word “sharia” necessarily means many things to many people. Even though Islam is very simple in its basics, including conversion—you are a Muslim if you testify there is no God but God and Muhummad is the messenger of God—the faith comes with a fabulously esoteric scholarly tradition.

The access that Muslims have to sharia is through jurisprudence, or fiqh al-sharia, the comprehension of sharia. In Muslim history there were at least six major Sunni schools of law, with only four remaining (Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i); in Shia Islam there are two major approaches, usuli, based on deriving principles, and akhbari, a scripturalist posture that believes all answers are already written down in the Quran and the sayings of the Shiite saints.

Of course, there is also difference of opinion as to the relevant texts. Except for the Quran, Sunnis and Shiites typically disagree about everything. As for the hadith, or sayings of the prophet, the Sunnis believe the relevant hadith are those of the prophet and his companions, the sahaba; for the Shia, the meaningful hadith are those of the prophet as well as the imams who followed him. To produce fiqh, the Shia also have aql, or intellect, whereas the Sunnis go by the principle of qiyas, or reasoning by analogy, and also ijma, or consensus.

It is doubtful that Islam’s scholastic legal apparatus is what the former House speaker was referring to when he said that sharia “is the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth.” Among other things, he is referring to the notoriously vicious corporal punishments associated with so-called Islamic law as exercised in many Muslim-majority countries. Known as the huddud, these punishments, like stoning and lashing for adulterers, beheading for murderers, and so on, are most famously meted out by Islamist outfits like the Taliban in Afghanistan and also by the terror-propagating Pashtun militia’s two senior state-sponsors, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. There is little doubt that both these countries have had a hand in terrorism, including spectacular operations directed against the United States, like the Sept. 11 attacks. But unless Washington intends to make war on them, rather than putting Islamabad on the dole and selling Riyadh 84 advanced F-15s, as it is planning to do, it is counterproductive to associate sharia with our enemy.

Gingrich is also referring to how Muslims tend to perceive of non-Muslims and the fact that Muslim societies have historically treated non-Muslims as second-class citizens, with the status of protected peoples, or dhimmis. While this principle obviously runs against the grain of American culture, it is hard to see how it possibly threatens non-Muslim U.S. citizens, or even American Muslims of the Shiite sect who, since they are considered heretics by the Sunnis, have usually suffered worse fates than Christians and Jews in Sunni-majority lands. When Gingrich argues that “radical Islamists want to impose Sharia on all of us,” I can’t imagine how he sees that happening, short of the largest land invasion in human history of foreign Muslim soldiers, administrators, and religious scholars with the connivance of millions of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and pagan American collaborators. And look out, Mitt Romney and the Mormons!

The stealth scenario is slightly less preposterous—jihadis insinuating their way through our legal and political systems to slowly Islamize a credulous U.S. public degree by degree—but many times more repugnant. It is necessarily premised on the idea of a United States that has lost all faith and confidence in its own values and an intellectual and political elite too stupid to tell the difference between our founding principles and Islamic obscurantism. In this scenario, the same nation that came out of its Civil War a more perfect union is now just a few headscarves and beards away from becoming a Taliban backwater.

If to Gingrich sharia stands for everything wrong with Islam, Muslims associate it with all that is best about Islam—justice, accountability, the rule of law, and even democracy. That is to say, it’s a highly idealized version of reality that has little basis in fact. For most Muslims (moderate and non-moderate alike), sharia is a catchall phrase for legal principles that have rarely, if ever, existed in actual Muslim societies, where the law of the land is not God’s but the ruler’s. It is not abstract notions of “sharia” but the actual application of the ahkam al-sultaniyya, or laws of the ruler, that have shaped the reality of most Muslim societies over the last millennium.

The notion that something called “sharia” was widely imposed throughout the lands of Islam is an Orientalist fantasy. If Gingrich’s Orientalism—sharia represents an all-encompassing totalitarian force—is of the negative variety, positive Orientalism asserts that Muslim societies were just and well-administered until Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and the colonial legacy that ensued. The driving force behind this positive Orientalism is none other than the Islamist movement. For instance, the Islamists reasoned that the Arabs lost the 1967 war with Israel because they no longer practiced the true religion. Islam had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and Muslim societies needed to return to the essentials of the faith as practiced by the prophet of Islam and the righteous forebears, al-salaf. Those who adopted such ahistorical beliefs are known as salafists, whose ranks include a broad spectrum of Islamists including the Muslim Brotherhood. In the hands of the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, sharia was another wedge used to divide Muslim populations from the ruling regimes. In time, the regimes adapted so that today the Egyptian constitution names sharia as its principle source of legislation, and the new Iraqi constitution cites it as a fundamental source; but this is essentially window-dressing to placate pious Muslims and ward off the Islamists.

The Islamists are hardly more specific about what sharia means. When Banna spoke of sharia to the Egyptian masses, he meant something similar to the empty Western left-wing mantra of “social justice.” In any case, the Islamist definition of sharia is something very different from the thousand-year-old enterprise that had devoted its scholarly energies to discerning how to understand and implement, if possible, God’s revealed word. Aside from notable exceptions like Youssef al-Qaradawi, almost none of the notables even vaguely affiliated with the Islamist movement are scholars. What they know about sharia is only slightly more than what Newt Gingrich thinks he knows about it.

It is surpassingly strange that a concept revived by Islamists as a political tool may now be serving a similar purpose in the United States, where sharia is no more likely to affect the American way of life than the burial rituals of the ancient Egyptians are likely to influence our funerary rites. When the organizer behind the lower Manhattan Islamic center, Imam Feisal Rauf, says that the U.S. legal system is “sharia-compliant,” he is not preparing the way for a regime of lashings and beheadings; he is engaging in a species of inter-Muslim apologetics—which are also pro-American, even if in a roundabout way.

There is no comparing the Islamic sharia and the U.S. Constitution. The idealized notion of God’s law as derived from the Quran and hadith does not guarantee freedom of religious belief, or freedom of expression, including blasphemy, as the United States does in practice. The same is true for concepts like freedom of association and political rights, including the right to form political parties. Americans have long enjoyed freedoms that many Muslims, including the Islamists, say they have aspired to for more than a thousand years. To claim that Muslim societies—in their idealized form—also promote the freedoms that Americans really enjoy is not a threat to the U.S. Constitution but a relatively shame-free way of engaging a subject that is embarrassing to a society extremely sensitive to shame.

But what’s more embarrassing is that the political leaders of a free country imagine that our freedoms are threatened, not by real men with real weapons who are supported by states that claim to be our allies, but by a scare word whose real-world applications are obscure to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Meantime, the mufti of Nablus has issued a public health alert in the guise of a religious proclamation, reminding residents that under Sharia law, “it is forbidden to hug or kiss anyone suffering from a contagious disease in order to prevent it from spreading.” Ynet readers astutely observed in the article’s comments section that “if the Muslims would choose Hashem instead of allah as their god, Psalm 91 would cover them in this” and that “if you’re infected, only hug the jews.”

Nablus Mufti: Avoid Physical Contact to Contain H1N1 Virus [Ynet]