All of this may appall some in the West. Why, they wonder, is Islam so obsessed with law? This has led some critics to assert that “Islam is not even a religion” but rather “a political system.”

The reason for this misunderstanding is that many Westerners’ ideas about religion are based mainly on Christianity, whose very Savior reportedly gave up the will to legislate “the kingdom of this world.”

However, there is another Abrahamic religion that is much more similar to Islam on this matter, and it may offer some perspective: Judaism. The Jewish tradition of divine law, Halakha, which also means “the way,” is what Shariah is modeled on. Like Shariah, Halakha has many rules on matters of personal observance — what to eat, what to wear — that Orthodox Jews still follow. But it also has harsh punishments, including stoning and even burning to death, for crimes such as adultery, blasphemy and idolatry.

The big difference between Judaism and Islam here is that the former lost political power nearly 2,000 years ago, at which time the Halakha’s penal code became ineffective. Rabbis, as leaders of often persecuted minorities, accepted the laws of their host countries, declaring, “the law of the kingdom is the law.” Today, most Muslim scholars give the same advice to Muslims living in the West, whereas Islamists don’t want to give up the ideal of theocracy. (The modern state of Israel was born as mainly a secular entity, and those who would like to see a state run according to Halakha constitute a small minority.)

Yet a lack of power wasn’t the only thing that led Jews to abandon the constraints of Halakha, there was also the Enlightenment — more specifically the “Jewish Enlightenment.” Its proponents, like the 18th-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, reinterpreted Judaism in the light of modern values like secular knowledge, rationality and freedom of conscience. The arguments Mendelssohn articulated in his 1783 masterpiece, “Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism,” are remarkably similar to the arguments by Muslim reformists today. (In other words, the Jewish Enlightenment, not Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation, is the right analogy for the reform needed in contemporary Islam.)

It is also worth noting that at the time, some Western liberals viewed the Jewish Enlightenment as a futile attempt to transmute a hopelessly legalist religion. One of them was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who depicted Judaism as “not a religion at all, but a political constitution.” Jews would never become true Europeans, Kant added, unless they accepted “the religion of Jesus” and a “euthanasia of Judaism” took place. This anti-Semitic view from the 18th century sounds remarkably similar to some fashionable anti-Islamic views of today.