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The 'fear of God' strikes many moderns as odd fit for piety -- all the more in an age when 'moralistic therapeutic deism' reigns as spiritual zeitgeist of our era. The piety of early Muslim renunciants (zuhhād; sing. zāhid) upends this view -- examples to follow ...
Very common is the expression of a wish to have been born at all (at least as a human) -- regardless of one's eternal fate. Thus the caliph Abū Bakr (d. 13/634), “I wish I were this tree, eaten and cut down.” 
The caliph ʿUmar (d. 23/544), “ʿUmar took a straw from the ground and said, ‘Would that I were this straw. Would that I had not been a thing. Would that my mother had not given birth to me. Would that I had become something totally forgotten.’”
Ibn Masʿūd (d. 32/652), “If I were between Paradise and the Inferno and given a choice between having my works accepted and being nothing, I should choose to be nothing.”
Again, Ibn Masʿūd, “If I were standing between Paradise and the Inferno and told, ‘Choose—you may choose to be in whichever of them you like or you may become ashes’, I should like to be ashes.”
ʿĀʾishah (wife of the Prophet) said: Would that I were something totally forgotten – a menstrual rag.
al-Fuḍayl ibn ʿIyāḍ (d. 187/803, Mecca): If I were given the choice of living as a dog, dying as a dog, and not seeing Resurrection Day, I should prefer living as a dog, dying as a dog, and not seeing Resurrection Day.
Early zāhids cultivated taqwā+khashyah not as an anodyne God-consciousness–they cultivated abject terror of God so acute they preferred oblivion to eternal felicity (or, at least so they claimed). Passages like this from the Enc. of the Qurʾan, thus, strike me as ill-conceived.
Further, detailed references for and discussions of the passages cited above (plus many, many more) can be found in the Christopher Melchert's article: jstor.org/stable/23011473
