The Analysis Method of Value Concepts in Quran; A Comparison between Toshihiko Izutsu and Ayatollah MisbahYazdi's Moral Views

The Holy Quran contains a lot of religious, moral, and educational guidelines which ought to be extracted and made known, to the young. Many orientalists have dealt with this issue with the aim of understanding and presenting the invaluable Quranic concepts to western people, and explained to the western societies only part of the revealed and divine sciences. One of these orientalists is the Japanese scholar, Toshihiko Izutsu, who sought to examine the Quran, understand and explain its moral concepts and translate them into his own language. Professor Allamah Mohammad TaqhiMisbah, a contemporary scholar on ethics, has used a new method to explain the moral concepts from a Quranic perspective. This present paper compares between some of the works of each these two authors on ethics and makes a contrast between them with regard to the authors’character, subject matter, aims, contents, and method. Finally, it investigates and criticizes the two books and shows their strengths and weaknesses. The author concludes that “Morals in the Qur’an” by AllamahMisbahYazdi has real strengths and “Semantic Structure of Religious-ethical concepts in Qur’an" by Izutsu has some shortcomings.