Titus Burckhardt
Titus Burckhardt also known as Ibrahim Izz al-Din was a Swiss academic and writer. Burckhardt a German-Swiss, was born in Florence, Italy in 1908 and died in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1984. He devoted all his life to the study and exposition of the different aspects of Wisdom tradition.
Burckhardt was an member of the "Traditionalist School" of twentieth-century authors and was a frequent contributor to the journal Studies in Comparative Religion along with other prominent members of the school.Life
Burckhardt came from the patrician Burckhardt family of Basel, who had also produced the Orientalist and convert to Islam, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. He was the great-nephew of the art-historian Jacob Burckhardt and the son of the sculptor Carl Burckhardt. Titus Burckhardt was a contemporary of Frithjof Schuon – leading exponent of traditionalist thought in the twentieth century – and the two spent their early school days together in Basel around the time of the First World War. This was the beginning of an intimate friendship and harmonious intellectual and spiritual relationship that was to last a lifetime.
Burckhardt was, like his grandfather, a connoisseur of Islamic art, architecture and civilisation. He compiled and published work from the Sufi masters: Ibn Arabi, Abd-al-karim Jili and Muhammad al-Arabi al-Darqawi.
