Mr. Gingrich’s comments are the latest iteration in the effort to make Shariah into a target. His goal seems to be to disclaim condemnation of Muslims per se by saying that Muslims would not be dangerous as long as they rejected Shariah.

But that’s like saying Christians would be acceptable so long as they repudiated the doctrine of Christ’s divinity, or that Jews could be tolerated if they denied God’s revelation to Moses at Sinai. Shariah is that central to orthodox Islamic faith.

That doesn’t mean, however, that all Muslims accept the tenets of Islamic law as interpreted by the most traditional and extreme schools of thought. A vast majority of Muslims reject the use of Shariah to legitimate terrorism.

In his masterpiece, “What Is Islam?” published in 2015, the scholar Shahab Ahmed argued sharply against conflating Islam itself with Islamic law and orthodox doctrine. In his definition, Islam is a protean human phenomenon, rife with contradictions. At its core, Mr. Ahmed argued, Islam is a way of meaning-making through the text of the Quran, the world in which the Quranic text came to be, and the context of actual Muslims’ interpretation of both those things.