Zawahiri, like all jihadists and jihad theorists such as Sayyid Qutb and Syed Abul Ala Maududi, equates freedom with Sharia. While it’s jarring to Western sensibilities to equate a legal system that mandates discrimination against women and non-Muslims with freedom, it’s perfectly understandable from Zawahiri’s perspective: Sharia, he believes, is the law of Allah, and thus takes precedence over all other legal structures.
But Sharia, of course, does not really offer freedom. It offer coercion and fear. If one abstains from adultery from fear of stoning, that is not virtue; it is terror. Virtue would be to abstain from adultery out of an inner conviction and determination to act charitably toward one’s spouse. Thus Western societies, with all their libertinism, provide the essential context for genuine freedom and genuine virtue: if one is not free to do wrong, one’s doing right is only the virtue and freedom of the slave.
From AFP, :
An audiotape purportedly of Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri hit out at the US concept of freedom, saying it was a cloak for spreading corruption and injustice in the Islamic world.
Liberty as construed by the Americans was based on “usurious banks, giant companies, misleading media outlets and the destruction of others for material gain,” charged the voice in the recording aired by Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera.
Real freedom was “not the liberty of homosexual marriages and the abuse of women as a commodity to gain clients, win deals or attract tourists,” said the voice.
“It is not the freedom of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,” it said, referring to US-run prisons in Cuba and Iraq where serious allegations of torture have been levelled.
“Our freedom … and the reform that we are seeking depends on three concepts — the rule of sharia (Islamic law) … freeing Islam from any aggressor … and liberating the human being.”
In the Islamic world, the people had the “right to choose its leader, hold him to account, criticise him and isolate him,” said the audiotape, in a clear response to US calls for democratic reforms in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
“I do not think that we can achieve reform while we are under American and Jewish occupation.”