Book Review
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Bahman Zakipour. Izutsu Toshihiko no hikaku tetsugaku: shinteki na mono to shakaiteki
na mono no arasoi (“Toshihiko Izutsu’s Comparative Philosophy: A Conflict
between the Social and the Divine”).1
Tokyo: Chisen Shokan, 2019. 307 + xxiv
pp. ISBN 9784862852915. 5300 yen.
In 1979, in the midst of the Iranian Revolution, the polymath comparative
philosopher Izutsu Toshihiko (1914–1993) fled his post at the Imperial Iranian
Academy of Philosophy and returned to his native Japan. Reinstalled to a
chair at his alma mater, Keio University, he made a final turn from Islamic
philosophy towards Japan’s own philosophical tradition. In this final and most
mature articulation of Izutsu’s thought, language is produced in Buddhist
terms by “linguistic storehouse consciousness” (gengo-arayashiki), and therefore
the meanings of language are all temporary and contingent, just like the states
of existence and mind produced by dependent arising.
Izutsu’s mature work is regarded in Japan as a particularly excellent local
articulation of the philosophia perennis, the belief in an essential unity among the
world’s wisdom traditions, and his books remain popular among philosophically
minded Japanese today. Izutsu provides readers with a thrillingly vast spatial
and temporal definition for the “East,” imagining the Spain of Ibn ʿArabi and
the Greece of Plato as manifestations of an ultimately superhistorical Orient,
equivalent with the source of perennial wisdom described in Islamic philosophy.
From Izutsu, Japanese readers can perceive a basis for discovering a common
“Eastern” wisdom which Japan might share with other non-Western countries.
Izutsu Toshihiko no hikaku tetsugaku is the doctoral dissertation of Bahman
Zakipour, an Iranian philosopher based in Tokyo. Interpreting Izutsu’s work
as a specific approach to comparative philosophy, it is divided into three parts:
1. With the exception of this English title, which is given on the book’s cover page, all
quotations in this review were translated by the reviewer.
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“The Essence and Consequences of Comparative Philosophy,” “The Significance
of Izutsu’s Comparative Philosophy: Concerning the Divine,” and “A Conflict
Between the Social and Divine: In Search of the Superhistorical Tradition.”
Zakipour analyzes Izutsu’s intent and details some of his ideas as they pertain
to comparative philosophy and mystical experience, but he also reaches the
conclusion that Izutsu was not able to accomplish everything he set out to do,
and in the course of his analysis of the contradictions contained within Izutsu’s
thought, he turns our attention from the finger pointing at the moon to the
intent of the one pointing the finger. Zakipour interrogates our academic and
personal motivations for doing comparative philosophy and complicates the
good-natured desire for sympathy with “the East” in a world of power politics.
Izutsu Toshihiko no hikaku tetsugaku is neither a deconstructive nor a modernist
critique. Part of the book, which I will abbreviate here, attempts to simply outline
Izutsu’s comparative philosophy, demonstrating his good grasp of Islamic
philosophical terms, but this is mixed with accounts of Izutsu’s meetings with
Iranians and discussions of the limitations of his work. Although a brief Englishlanguage synopsis in the back of the book describes it as grounded in Foucauldian
analysis (304), the reader will be hard-pressed to find more than a single reference
to Foucault within its two hundred and seventy pages. The real thesis of the
book, I think, is to propose an inconsistency between Izutsu’s proclamation of
the need for comparative philosophy to obtain “mutual understanding between
nations” and his careful avoidance of opportunities to enter into dialogue with
revolutionary Iranian thought. I believe Zakipour has uncovered an important
issue with Izutsu’s invocation of the specific mystical language of Shia Islam as the
basis for a common “Eastern” mysticism. Zakipour argues that in its reduction to
a subjective, individual phenomenon, mystical experience under Izutsu’s scheme
is “re-religionized” and recaptured for modern secularism.
Introducing the theme of comparative philosophy and values, Zakipour
contrasts Samuel Huntington’s 1998 depiction of philosophical difference as a
“clash of civilizations,” which was for a time predominant in the United States,
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with Iranian Prime Minister Moḥammad Khātamī’s simultaneous call for a
“dialogue of civilizations,” which won favor at the United Nations. For historical
context, he points to the political meaning and social power of comparative
philosophy among premodern Muslims, from Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī (973–
1048)’s praise of Indian philosophy written directly in response to his patron’s
destruction of Hindu temples, to the Mughal prince Dārā Shikōh (1615–1659),
whose inclusive view of Hindu philosophy lost out to the destructive tactics
of his brother Aurangzeb.2
Zakipour suggests that regardless of historical era,
the project of demonstrating an esoteric unity of differing worldviews through
comparative philosophy is not a purely metaphysical determination made in a
vacuum, but stands in direct conflict with powerful political interests.
Izutsu was employed for four years at public expense in the Shah’s Imperial
Iranian Academy of Philosophy, and in his work, he described the urgent need for
“mutual understanding” between nations, ideally based in the philosophia perennis
(107). Following the Iranian Revolution, Izutsu’s work on Islam remained beloved
among Iranians. However, he always found reasons to avoid direct engagement
with revolutionary Iran. Around 1984, then-President Khāmene’ī (now Supreme
Leader) invited him back to Iran to speak, but Izutsu pleaded illness (167). At
another point in the 1980s, the Iranian ambassador to Japan urged Izutsu several
times to give a speech at the embassy, at one point even offering to visit him in
his home, but Izutsu refused every time, claiming he was too busy (168).
In a 1984 publication, Izutsu offered a theological perspective on the Iranian
Revolution, asserting with all the firmness of a believer that the occultation
of the twelfth imam in Shia Islam precludes divine authorization for any sort
of secular government. He conceded that Iran is “groping for a way by which
they can live in the current situation of international upheaval” (260), but this
reviewer perceives some connection between his theological objection and his
2. Some other examples of premodern Persian comparative philosophy can be found in Shankar Nair’s Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (California: University of California Press, 2020).
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real-life hesitance to engage with representatives of post-revolutionary Iran. If
Izutsu had spoken at the Iranian embassy or engaged in public dialogue with
Iranian Muslims as he was doing with many Japanese intellectuals, his critique
would have been the opening of a lengthy historical and theological discussion,
which he avoided. We might explain this in one of three ways: 1) his theological
objection concealed pragmatic objections to the nation’s new government, 2)
it concealed a more deeply hypocritical distaste for Islamic practice generally,
or 3) Izutsu respected Islamic practice from a distance but was uncomfortable
with directly encountering evangelists or discussing political implementation.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the final possibility is the most likely.
Izutsu told his student, Mehdi Mohaghegh, that a chance meeting with a
Shia ulama group was the first “spiritual meeting” he had ever experienced. But
despite his fascination with the ulama, he refused to seek out such meetings with
contemporary Shia philosophers in Tehran. Henry Corbin held weekly meetings
in the Velenjak district with an Iranian all-star philosophical circle that included
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Allāma Tabataba’i, Dariush Shayegan, and Morteza
Motahharī. In a Farsi publication, Nasr has described this Velenjak circle as the
greatest comparative discussion between Islamic and Western philosophy that
had ever taken place since the days of Ibn Rushd. Nasr told Zakipour that he
implored Izutsu countless times to participate in this circle, but Izutsu always
refused, without citing any specific reason (221). Therefore, we see that Izutsu’s
refusal to dialogue directly with Shia intellectuals began before 1979.
In this we can see an enigma emerge in Izutsu’s project. Izutsu tried to ground
his “Eastern” philosophical outlook in Islamic or specifically Shia Muslim
philosophy, yet he rejected every opportunity to hear directly from practicing
Muslims about how philosophy related to their mental and bodily practices and
their general world outlook. Borrowing a phrase from the Syrian philosopher
Ṣādiq Jalāl al-‘Aẓm (1934–2016), Zakipour describes Izutsu’s outlook as “reverse
Orientalism”: the mirror image of Orientalism, produced in the same way through
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essentializing of the East-West distinction. For Izutsu, rather than the East losing
its agency through decadence and degeneracy, it is precisely because “the East” is
too pure, the source of wisdom and light, that it cannot be permitted to engage in
political self-representation. Izutsu did not want to contemplate Iranian Muslims
as living people searching for a way to adapt their “Eastern” beliefs and practices
to the “secularizing” modern language of the Westphalian nation-state.
To understand how Izutsu idealized an “Eastern” purity and situated it
against academic philosophy, Zakipour contrasts his methodology with that
of Paul Masson-Oursel (1882–1956), progenitor of the modern discipline of
comparative philosophy. While also writing from a place of sympathy, MassonOursel emphasized rigorous historical discipline, grounded in an awareness
that philosophical writing is historically and culturally contingent (53).
Drawing on Corbin’s objections to Masson-Oursel, Izutsu eventually adopted
a “metahistorical” stance, where a certain metaphysical outlook is needed to
evaluate philosophical shifts over time.
Zakipour indicates that several dangers arise from this stance. Without knowledge
of the multivocal histories of a tradition and the foreign languages in which its
wisdom is expressed, concepts may be dislodged from their historical context
and essentialized as ahistorical, “perennial” truths. Meanwhile, from a political
perspective, such a stance may be used to construct idealized national identities,
and to center specific worldviews at the expense of worldviews deemed peripheral.
In short, because Izutsu’s stance is super-historical, he lacks the grounds to evaluate
the sociopolitical contingency of philosophical change. Zakipour concludes:
For Izutsu and his collaborators, the encounter between Western and non-Western
philosophies invites the great political risk of undermining spiritual foundations
through the secularization of the world. Therefore, the responsibility and duty of comparative philosophy is to restore mankind’s lost spirituality and discover a way of overcoming secularism. In other words, they believed that comparative philosophies and
ideas could overcome the crisis of secularism by comparing and re-reading the concepts
of spiritual tides in history.
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The transcendence found in superhistoricality should be understood in this context.
While this transcendence is deemed sacred, we will see presently that it is not the [same
type of] sanctity which has been socially constructed as religions from premodern times.
The problem, however, is that within this project for overcoming secularism, this new sacred inevitably becomes re-religionized, that is, recaptured by the system. This is nothing
more than the reification that Corbin, Izutsu, and their collaborators tried to avoid (61).
Izutsu, following Corbin, developed his personal variety of comparative
philosophy “beneath a normative field including divine wisdom, mysticism,
religious experience, mythology, poetry, and morality” (66). Corbin, especially,
insisted that the substitution of social reality for divine reality produced
secularism and nihilism. For Corbin, comparative philosophy provides a way
to escape from social constructionism and overcome the strictures of secular
historiography. While Izutsu did not repeat such harsh critiques of modernity,
he eventually adopted Corbin’s reasoning that the “Eastern” philosophy that
serves as the object of comparative study is only a symbol by which one might
access Islamic philosophy’s superhistorical, esoteric East (mashriq)—the direction
from which light emerges. By this reasoning, not only was Izutsu able to include
ancient Greece and medieval Spain within his definition of “the East,” but
philosophy itself became a “diachronic East,” a superhistorical reality standing
outside of contingent, temporal facts (77).
What exactly is the function of the diachronical and spiritual East?
Zakipour hones in on abstractions in Izutsu’s late work that are closely linked
to his expansive definition of the East. Human consciousness starts out in
what Izutsu calls B-territory, guided only to perceive differentiation. The
mystical experience, which Izutsu identifies with the Arabic fanā, awakens the
consciousness to undifferentiated reality, the “light of lights” (nur al-anwār) or
in Izutsu’s terminology A-territory. However, original reality is completely
beyond differentiated language. In the subsequent transition, identified as baqā’
or the Sufi state of enlightened existence, those with knowledge of reality try
to use language to express it to the world. This Izutsu describes as M-territory,
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a medial state in between the undifferentiated Real and the dependently arisen
worlds of essences and forms (157).
While this seems like a straightforward presentation of Islamic mysticism,
Zakipour takes issue with how Izutsu makes mystical experience the only basis
of any legitimate knowledge:
Certainly, Izutsu and Corbin’s objective is to overcome the problems and crises of the
present world (B-territory). However, their method of resolving this is to search for the
unmanifest territory (M-territory). M-territory is something obtained through mystical
experience, and only the mystic or the ascetic can envision phenomena and “understand”
(or “interpret”). In other words, it seems the general public will never be able to envision
and “understand.” Can the “understanding” of M-territory never be more than personal
and subjective? . . . Because sociopolitical problems and crises are attached to B-territory,
does that mean their resolution must be sought within B-territory? . . . When [Izutsu and
Corbin] argue for superhistoricity and superregionality, taking infinitude for granted,
they take us beyond the constraints of specific societies, times, and politics. They have
no language to talk about the appearance of an overturned politicality (161–2).
For me, Zakipour’s critique hits the mark not because I know that it perfectly
coincides with Izutsu’s large body of work, but because it matches perfectly with
the sociological mystery that Zakipour uncovered through interviews with various
participants of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, summarized above.
Izutsu constructed a type of esoteric knowledge which can be hardly spoken of
except in reference to itself, so he was necessarily wary of dialogue with others
who claimed both understanding of esoteric knowledge and the ability to use that
knowledge as a solution for this-worldly problems. As Zakipour concludes:
For Izutsu, religious ideas belong to the territory of creative imagination, and those
ideas cannot be reduced to the sociopolitical phase. If religious ideas were reduced to
the sociopolitical phase, they would become no more than “external things.” . . . Izutsu’s
comparative philosophy reduces all phenomena to the territory of creative imagination,
or to unchanging essences. . . . But Khomeinī’s thesis and the Iranian Revolution broke
through the wall separating “internal” from “external” (260–61).
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Why exactly did Izutsu construct such a peculiar hermeneutic? I disagree with
Zakipour that this aspect of his thought was merely influenced by Henry Corbin.
We can already see idiosyncrasy in Izutsu’s Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’an, which
was originally published in English in 1959 before his direct collaboration with
Corbin began. Zakipour observes that while this book describes the Qur’an as a
“sacred teaching,” Izutsu contradicts himself by ignoring the Qur’anic text’s embeddedness within the Abrahamic tradition as well as the biographical traditions of the
Prophet Muhammad, completely rejecting it as a teaching dependent on inherited
knowledge and religious expertise (99). Based on this novel and rather modernist
assertion, Izutsu creates a justification to completely ignore centuries of traditional
Islamic exegesis or tafsir. (Zakipour incorrectly claims that past researchers have
“said nothing” about this. While it is overlooked in Japan and perhaps Iran, Izutsu’s readers in Turkey and Malaysia have been pointing this out for some years).3
Keeping this in mind, Zakipour seems too quick to merge Corbin with Izutsu.
He writes that Izutsu adopted Corbin’s “mysticism (gnosis) as an ‘antidote,’ so to
speak, against the spread of secularism and Western intellectualism” (85), and at several points he quotes Corbin’s assertion that “Shiism is the gnosis of Islam,” but he
never explains Corbin’s definition of gnosis. For Corbin, gnosis is “not a teaching
for the masses, but an initiatory teaching passed on to each specially chosen disciple.”4
Izutsu was not interested in this type of gnosis and the term “gnosis” only
rarely appears in his own work. In Izutsu’s conception, ultimate reality is expressed
through terms like “nameless,” “nothingness,” “void,” or “zero-point of consciousness.” Hence, Izutsu’s position is that regardless of whether one is speaking esoterically or exoterically, there is no special knowledge to be obtained nor teaching to be
initiated into.5
What Izutsu considers “Eastern” wisdom or knowledge is a method
3. Ismail Albayrak, “The Reception of Toshihiko Izutsu’s Qur’anic Studies in the Muslim World:
With Special Reference to Turkish Qur’anic Scholarship.” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 14.1 (2012): 73–106.
4. Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (Boston, MA: Kegan Paul, 1983), 153.
5. Sawai Yoshitsugu, “The Structure of Reality in Izutsu’s Oriental Philosophy,” Intellectual
Discourse 17 (2009): 143.
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of relating between this ultimate nothingness (here meant in the Buddhistic, not
nihilistic, sense) and contingent reality.
This anti-gnostic aspect of Izutsu’s philosophy seems to me to fill in some blanks
in Zakipour’s thesis. We should consider reading Izutsu’s uniquely liberal reading
of the Qur’an and his segregation of the Shia imaginal from political practice in
light of his beliefs about ultimate reality. We might consider that Izutsu’s work
focuses on the medial or revelatory imagination, which Izutsu calls “M-territory,”
because his beliefs about mystical experience and about the liminality produced in
“M-territory” are similar to those of Muslim theologians, while his beliefs about
the eternal reality (“A-territory”) accessed through such experiences seem to differ.
Izutsu could have been hesitant to enter into dialogue with political Islam precisely
because it would require confronting the content of eternal truth.
Twentieth century arguments for esoteric access to traditional truths, both at
the academic and religionist levels, frequently employed Corbin’s language of traditional philosophy and religion as a redoubt, a mental position from which one
could make a last stand against the rising tide of global “nihilism.” The security
of tradition, the confidence coming from a proper orientation, allowed one to
“ride the tiger” of modernity. The most complete academic treatment of esoteric
traditionalism to date, Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and
the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004),
focuses on the most committed believers in redoubt, but it became a common
refrain among traditionalist intellectuals, as seen in Alaistair MacIntyre’s throwaway reference to the coming of “St. Benedict” of the secular age at the end of his
After Virtue (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
Japan’s attitude to the Copernican shifts of modernity is markedly different
from the West, so it is not unexpected that Izutsu is among the most openminded of the perennialist or traditionalist school of twentieth-century religious
philosophers. While he envisions a “spiritual East” which conceals esoteric
truths, readers will be hard pressed to identify in Izutsu’s work the combative
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anti-modernism of a René Guénon. What fascinates me about Zakipour’s
interpretation of Izutsu is that he locates in Izutsu’s work the quietly outlined
social and theological boundaries of his intellectual redoubt: the social in his
anxious relationship with political Islam, and the theological in his definition of
the “spiritual East” by a cordoned-off “M-territory.” Furthermore, in reminding
us of the warm reception Izutsu’s works found among Iranian revolutionary
thinkers, Zakipour shows that the undoing of these protective barriers began, if
unconsciously, almost fifty years ago.
Avery Morrow
contact@avery.morrow.name
