Toshihiko Izutsu Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur'an

Annotation

In the Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur'an Toshihiko Izutsu analyzes the guiding spirit of the Islamic moral code, the basic ethical relationship of man to God. Izutsu asserts that, according to the Qur'anic conception, God is of an ethical nature and acts upon man in an ethical way. The resulting implications for man are enormous, requiring devotion not merely to God but to living one's life ethically. Izutsu shows that for the Qur'an our ethical response to God's actions is religion itself; it is at the same time both ethics and religion. Izutsu explores these themes by employing ethnolinguistics, a theory of the interrelations between linguistic cultural patterns, to analyse the semantic structure of major concepts in the Quar'an.