The concept of freedom in Islam

Human are, according to the Islamic perspective, created in the "image of God" and are also God's vicegerents (khalifah) on earth. But they are both, by virtue of their servitude to God which makes it possible for them to receive from Heaven and to administer on earth. By virtue of their centrality in the cosmic scheme, proven in reverse if proof is necessary for the sceptic by the nearly complete destruction they have brought upon the environment, they participate in the Divine freedom, and by virtue of being earthly creatures they are best by all the limitations which a lower degree of existence implies. God is both pure freedom and pure necessity. Man as the theophany of the Divine Names and Qualities, or as the "image of God", participates in both this freedom and this necessity. Personal freedom lies in fact in surrender to the Divine will and in purifying oneself inwardly to an ever greater degree so as to become liberated from all external conditions, including those of the carnal soul (nafs), which press upon and limit one's freedom.
Pure freedom belongs to God alone; therefore the more we are, the more are we free. And this intensity in the mode of existence cannot be reached sake through submission and conformity to the will of God who alone is in the absolute sense. There is no freedom possible through flight from and rebellion against the Principle which is the ontological source of human existence and which determines ourselves from on high. To rebel against our own ontological Principle in the name of freedom is to become enslaved to an ever greater degree in the world of multiplicity and limitation. It is to forfeit the illimitable expanses of the world of the Spirit for the indefinitely extended labyrinth of the psycho-physical world, where the only freedom is to pursue an ever more accelerated life of action devoid of meaning and end.
Infinity resides in the centre of our being, a center which is hidden from the vast majority of those who live on the periphery of the wheel of existence. Yet only at the centre we are free in an absolute and infinite sense. Otherwise each of us is limited in both our powers and rights by God, nature and other human beings. To seek infinity in the finite is the most dangerous of illusions, a chimera which cannot but result in the destruction of the finite itself. "Infinite freedom" exists only in the proximity of the Infinite. At all lower levels of existence freedom is conditioned by the limitations of cosmic existence itself and is meaningful only with respect to the limitations and obligations which the very structure of Reality imposes upon us.