Sufism

Death should be remembered often, for it cuts short all vain hope

Ghazali treats frequent, deliberate thought about death not as morbid but as the specific antidote to the false sense of unlimited time that keeps people chasing minor ambitions.

Book 40 of the Ihya Ulum al-Din, on the remembrance of death and the afterlife, closes the work's fourth quarter and argues that dhikr al-mawt, remembrance of death, functions as a corrective to what Ghazali calls length of hope, the habitual assumption of indefinite future time he treats as one of the most persistent sources of spiritual heedlessness. Drawing on the Prophetic exhortation to remember often the destroyer of pleasures, he presents this remembrance as a practical discipline rather than a passive mood, something to be deliberately returned to, since its absence lets minor worldly attachments accumulate unchecked weight. The placement of this book at the close of the Ihya's practical-ethics section is itself an argument: no amount of correct outward conduct fully holds without this final, sobering awareness underneath it, since without a felt sense of mortality the other disciplines can slide back into performance rather than genuine priority.

Ihya Ulum al-Din