COMMENT | Do you know when governments are wary of the people they govern? When they march on the streets for whatever reason. When people of their own volition raise the national flag.

A national flag is an object, a thing, which people imbue with certain ideas. The ideas are the dangerous part, which is why depending on who is raising the flag, those ideas either ensure the social cohesion of a populace or destabilise it.

So, you see, it is not the object but rather the ideas imbued in the object or contained within it. Take the banning of books, for instance. The government banned books because of the ideas contained within them.

This is why, faced with a possible ban by Madani for two of their books, Islamic Renaissance Front (IRF) founder Ahmad Farouk Musa said, “It seems to us that this issue of creed - asha’irah and maturidiyah - has been weaponised by the religious authorities in this country to suppress any ideas that were deemed to be critical of the issues faced by Muslims concerning the revision of history associated with the Muslim scholars of the previous generations and any issues related to critical thinking.”

It is the same with religious totems. The items themselves are not important, but rather the ideas they inspire for those who hold them in reverence. It gets to the point when it is Pavlovian in nature.

See the object, and certain emotions are...