Reading group: al-Ghazālī on the remembrance of death, the last book of the Revival
The book I return to most often when I visit the sick is the fortieth and final book of al-Ghazālī's Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, the Revival of the Religious Sciences: Kitāb dhikr al-mawt wa-mā baʿdahu, the book of the remembrance of death and what comes after it.
It is not a treatise arguing that death is or is not a harm. Al-Ghazālī treats remembering death as a discipline that changes the person who practises it. The aim is not to solve a puzzle but to loosen the grip of what he calls long hope, the assumption that there is always more time, which he sees as the root of heedlessness.
Translation: T. J. Winter's English (Islamic Texts Society, 1989) has a very useful introduction and notes.
Plan, four weeks
- Week 1. The opening chapters: the merit of remembering death, and the chapter on long hope.
- Week 2. The death agonies and the reports of how the Prophet, his companions and the righteous met death.
- Week 3. Part Two: the grave and what follows, as the tradition describes it.
- Week 4. The closing chapters, ending with the breadth of God's mercy. It matters that the whole forty-book Revival ends on hope.
Members who don't share the faith are very welcome. Read week 3 as you would read any tradition's account of the afterlife: as a picture meant to shape how one lives now. My guiding question: what does it mean to treat a fact as a practice rather than a problem?