I can’t actually decide which quote is my favorite. For me, it depends on my mood, or what I may be going through in life. Senior year of high school, I was faced with the dilemma of choosing my senior quote for the yearbook. I knew of many people who had a specific inspirational quote in mind, or maybe a verse from the Bible, but I was completely stuck. I finally came up with an idea eventually, although I don’t think it was an actual quote by a specific person, but more of just a funny thing I saw somewhere and liked. So my senior quote is “Any pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard enough.” I really hope that in 20 years when my children ask to see my high school yearbooks, they appreciate my humor.
Of course, since my quote was just some funny phrase, I couldn’t credit it to any specific person. I know of a few people who ran into the issue of knowing which quote they wanted to use, but not knowing who said it originally. I even remember looking through my yearbook and seeing a quote that I know was said by a certain person, but they credited someone completely different. This is an example of how you shouldn’t trust everything on the Internet. Some people chose religious quotes, such as verses from the Bible. It is kind of hard to get that wrong, and even if you get the verse number wrong, its at least not as noticeable since it is still in the Bible.
It is important to think about the context in which the quote was originally said, so it is important to know who originally said it. Even in the Bible, context is important, especially because there are people who will take certain verses out of context to fit with a specific belief and ignore others that contradict it. That being said, context, to me at least, is almost more important than who initially said the quote. Of course, the author of the quote is considered context too, but it is definitely important to do some research and figure out the why and the who of the quote before trying to twist it and use it out of context.
I think this can relate to studying any religion, but since this class is about Islam, I will relate it to that. Going back to when we had readings from the Qur’an, it was important to do those readings while thinking about Islam as a religion. The very fact that it was an Islamic text provides some context, and if one were to quote something, they would need to keep in mind the context in which it was said in the Qur’an. I have a feeling that a lot of religious debates from various religions, not just Islam, come from the lack of context and research on things that are mentioned in the texts.