Izutsu's Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts is a marvelous work of exegetical scholarship. He wrote it while a professor of Islamic philosophy at McGill University at a time when he was entering a "new phase" of his intellectual life, one in which he found himself "groping" towards "a new type of Oriental philosophy based on a series of rigorously philological, comparative studies of the key terms of various philosophical traditions in the Near, Middle, and Far East."
It was an interesting project and, if nothing else, produced a modern study of Ibn 'Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam (in clear and often elegant English, no less) that, to my mind, makes a strong case for regarding Ibn 'Arabi and his "school" as the culmination of the pre-modern Muslim intellectual tradition.
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