School headscarf ban sparks rare protests in Azerbaijan and row with Turkey
Protests have taken place over the rules which have seen pupils wearing hijabs turned away from schools.
School headscarf ban triggers unusual protests in Azerbaijan and dispute with Turkey
“You are telling me, I can’t come to school?” a teenage girl wearing a navy blue Islamic headscarf says in a video, confronting a staff member at the school entrance.
The clip has spread widely on social media and shows a group of girls in hijabs standing behind her and applauding as she goes on: “Why should I have to give up my religion?”
Last Monday, Azerbaijan’s education ministry started enforcing new uniform regulations, turning away female students wearing hijabs. Demonstrations broke out outside state schools in the capital, Baku, and in several southern districts, including Masally and Jalilabad.
Protests are unusual in this oil- and gas-producing nation of 10.5 million people.
Azerbaijan is constitutionally secular, and the government strictly upholds that principle.
President Ilham Aliyev has ruled since 2003 and shows little tolerance for dissent. Opposition politicians and many independent journalists are in prison.
Azerbaijan sits between two neighbours, Turkey and Iran. Azerbaijanis are part of a Turkic group of nations and speak a language close to Turkish, making Turkey its nearest ally.
But like Iran to the south, Azerbaijan is mainly Shia - more than 60% of its population identifies as Shia Muslim, while most Turks are Sunni.
The interior ministry said it detained 37 people on Monday who tried to block the rules and “grossly violate public order”.
The regulations, approved on 21 September, prohibit clothing that contradicts “the principle of secularism in education” in state schools. They do not specifically mention the hijab. Similar rules were extended to teachers on 6 October.
In one video, pupils outside School No. 69 in Balakhany, outside Baku, hold a banner saying: “The hijab does not prevent anyone from getting an education.”
Videos have shown protests in and around the capital Baku.
Shahiza Huseynova, a mother protesting outside a school in the Mashtaga district of the capital, was detained on Tuesday.
In an interview with Meydan TV, an independent Azerbaijani-language outlet based in Germany, Huseynova’s husband Agha said she had been warned: “Either you take off your child’s hijab and send them to school, or you go to prison.”
Friends have also lost contact with Ilkin Huseynov, an activist who on Tuesday launched an online platform called “Let Leyli Go to School”. It provides free lessons from volunteer teachers to pupils barred from class.
According to a friend, Huseynov left his home in Baku with unidentified men at about 16:00 on Wednesday, and his phone has been switched off since then.
The authorities have not commented, but friends believe he has been detained. On Thursday, the platform’s Instagram page could not be accessed.
Since the protests began, users have reported difficulty accessing Instagram and TikTok without a virtual private network (VPN).
Most of the demonstrations have taken place in religiously conservative neighbourhoods in Baku’s outlying settlements and in southern districts near the 765km (475-mile) border with Iran.
The authorities have long been suspicious of religious influence from Iran, where more ethnic Azerbaijanis live than in Azerbaijan itself.
On the night of 13 October, Azerbaijan’s State Service for Special Communications and Information Security said a “foreign hacker group” attacked more than 100 state websites.
A pro-Iranian group calling itself the 313 Team (Cyber Islamic Resistance) claimed responsibility.
Azerbaijani officials have defended the rules. One MP, Nigar Arpadarai, told the 1news.az website that children do not choose to wear the hijab themselves but are influenced by their families.
“A child has no freedom to choose a religion. This is a conscious prerogative of adults,” she said.
The dispute has now spread to Turkey, Baku’s closest ally, which gave crucial support during Azerbaijan’s 2020 war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The two countries describe themselves as “one nation, two states”.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a devout Muslim, has spoken about creating a “pious generation”.
His chief adviser, Oktay Saral, called the Azerbaijani restrictions “unacceptable” and urged Baku to “reverse this mistake”.
“A headscarf is not an obstacle; it is a requirement of one’s faith!” Saral wrote on X.
Several MPs from Turkey’s governing AK Party also joined in.
Small rallies were held outside Azerbaijan’s embassy in Ankara, organised by Köklü Değişim, an Islamist movement linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir, and outside its consulate in Istanbul, organised by the conservative Islamist group Özgür-Der.
President Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan Party accused Turkish officials of an “openly defamatory” information campaign and “baseless accusations”, warning that Oktay Saral’s remarks could damage ties and cautioning against interference in Azerbaijan’s internal affairs.
Earlier this month, Ilham Aliyev himself said no one should “stick their noses into our way of life”.
There may be another source of tension behind the dispute. Turkish protesters have linked the headscarf rules to Azerbaijan’s close ties with Israel, which sells weapons to Baku and buys Azerbaijani oil.
Turkey’s relations with Israel have collapsed over Gaza, but Azerbaijan has tried to keep relations with both countries.
That is a difficult balancing act. On Thursday, when Israel’s President Isaac Herzog addressed a regional security summit hosted by Azerbaijan in Baku, delegations from Turkey, Iran and other countries walked out of the hall.