Remember Death: An Examination of Death, Mourning, and Death Anxiety Within Islam

Abstract

Abstract Scholarship and research in the field of thanatology require creative responses to address contemporary concerns regarding how people – individually and collectively – make sense of events and experiences associated with death and dying. This present study focuses on the broader Islamic traditions of the experience of death and the afterlife and provides a conceptual overview of the practices of mourning and memoria. This overview offers an exploration of considerations for the well-being of the deceased, interactions between the living and the dead, as well as how dreams act as conduits between the seen and unseen worlds. Additionally, this study draws from the narratives contained within the fortieth and final book of the eleventh-century Persian Muslim philosopher and jurist, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s epic, titled The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, to address and juxtaposition Muslim conceptions pertaining to death and the afterlife with death anxiety research not currently articulated within the wider Islamic scholarship. Through the exploration of Islamic traditions and the contribution of al-Ghazālī’s citations within The Remembrance, this work will demonstrate how broader reflections on recognising the inevitability of death and the importance of relinquishing earthly attachments posit a creative response to contemporary death anxiety research. Bearing in mind the commonly studied tenets within the wider corpus of al-Ghazālī’s impressive epic, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, it is the literature presented here which warrants full consideration for creative responses to the discussion on death that may consequently be of pastoral significance and provide techniques for lessening death anxiety.