Toshihiko Izutsu was born into a wealthy family in Japan. His father was a calligrapher and a Zen Buddhist. Izutsu was a well known Japanese scholar on Islam, having taught at Keio University, McGill University, Montreal and the Iranian Imperial Academy of Philosophy, Tehran. More than thirty scholarly works in Japanese and English are attributed to him, all of which demonstrate uniqueness of his thought through the construction of complex theoretical arguments. Complementing this
brilliance was his mastery of over twenty languages, including Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, Turkish, Sanskrit and Arabic. In 1958, he completed translation of the Qur'an, for the first time directly from Arabic to Japanese.