Foreign thinker
Toshihiko Izutsu
Toshihiko IzutsuComparative Philosophy, Islamic Studies, and LinguisticsJapanese
Life and Thought
Toshihiko Izutsu (1914–1993) was a prominent Japanese philosopher, Islamic scholar, linguist, and translator. He is recognized as a pioneer of comparative philosophy and the phenomenology of language, whose translation of the Quran into Japanese and semantic analysis of Islamic texts had a global impact.
Toshihiko Izutsu was born in Tokyo in 1914. He pursued his higher education at Keio University, demonstrating from his youth an astonishing talent for learning various languages (including Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and several European languages). Izutsu was the first person to translate the Quran directly from Arabic into Japanese; a meticulous translation that still holds high esteem.
After teaching at Keio University, he joined the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Canada by invitation, and for many years conducted research and taught there, as well as at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. During his time in Iran, Izutsu engaged in extensive scholarly collaborations with thinkers such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Mehdi Mohaghegh, and published important works on Islamic mysticism and Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Theosophy.
Izutsu's research methodology relied on semantic analysis and phenomenological structuralism. In his seminal works, including "God and Man in the Quran," "Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Quran," and "Sufism and Taoism," he sought to elucidate the worldview of the Quran and the commonalities between Islamic mysticism (particularly the school of Ibn Arabi) and Eastern traditions such as Taoism and Zen Buddhism within the framework of comparative philosophy. Izutsu passed away in 1993.
