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Mitchell_Porter comments on Are Your Enemies Innately Evil? - Less Wrong
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Eliezer, terrorists may not be evil mutants, but I'm pretty sure they do hate freedom. Islam translates to "submission to God", and if you look at the history of radical Islam, you'll see that their main opposition has been to freedom and liberalism all along. It all got started with a Muslim university student in the fifties who got disgusted with American immorality, and decided that Islam needed to stand against it, so he tried to overthrow the Egyptian government and establish an Islamic state. It failed, and he and his followers came to believe that it failed because Islam was being corrupted by Western freedoms and immorality.
They might not be evil, but their value structure is incompatible with ours.
Here's something that Muslim university student wrote:
Qutb hates "liberal" freedom, but he considers it internal slavery to animal desires, and it correlates with external slavery to a human hierarchy. Whereas knowledge of Islam humanizes you, and a shared knowledge of Islam allows people to live without dictators, because order comes from an impersonal source - shariah law - rather than the whim of a governing class.
Qutb definitely values a form of freedom, but says it can't exist unless you have Islam first.
Yup. Thank you for finding that quote; it pretty much proves my point. He hates the Western version of freedom, and wants to destroy it to replace it with the iron boot on Islamic rule (and seems to have missed that in order to implement sharia law, there have to be people doing the implementation).
The person who originally claimed that "they hate us for our freedom" was probably referring to a Western, enlightenment notion, called by that name.
The thing that the Muslim university student praises and calls freedom is apparently an Islamic religious idea, corresponding very roughly to the sort of freedom a recovering addict craves from his addictions.
If the words were tabooed, then you would probably see the coherence of both points of view, and I think, could fairly assert that Islamists really do "hate our freedoms" in a sense, so long as you don't allow this approximation to carry more than its fair burden of explanatory weight (as certain former POTUSs have done).
When you put it like that, it actually sounds a lot like the Kantian notion of heteronomy versus autonomy.
Sayyid Qutb is more than a random Muslim university student. He's a central thinker. He was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood when he wrote Milestones (the work you are citing).
I just want to point out that that concept sounds almost exactly like something John Winthrop (the first governor of the Massachusetts colony) said, although I'm not sure if it was his Model of Christian Charity or a different speech (I have it in a book but it's not with me at present).
Although it's actually your interpretation that's almost exactly the same, not so much the original quote. Basically that being free from God's will doesn't make you free, it makes you a slave to your animal desires, and you can only be free by being subservient to God. Rather interesting that the ideas aren't that different. Although it might be that it's not so much a common point of Abrahamic religion, but rather an independent response that very religious people develop in response to ideas of freedom. Also generally interesting to remember how incredibly different Western culture- not German culture or whatever, but English culture- were just a few centuries ago, compared to the way they are now.
Anyway, mostly just found that interesting. Slightly relevant to point out that calling it "the Western version of freedom" isn't quite accurate, as said version goes back less than three centuries. I could furthermore point to all the people who cite Winthrop or the Puritans are America's founders (ex. politicians who use the phrase "City on a Hill"), but that wouldn't really be accurate; they don't really agree with any of their ideals and cite them because they honestly don't know how alien their ideals were to us.