The hijab ban in Azerbaijan: a European mirage and shards of the mirror of identity

The crisis over the banning of the hijab in Azerbaijani schools gave me pause, as did the argument it set off well beyond the country's borders. Knowing Azerbaijan closely as I do, with its social and cultural make-up, and with the impressions formed over many visits and in conversations with Azerbaijanis from different backgrounds, I wanted to consider the matter from angles that go beyond a decision about school uniform, to what it reveals about a troubled relationship between identity, religion and the choices of the state.

In my conversations with Azerbaijani intellectuals I found a longing for values they feel have receded in the rush towards modernisation, while others spoke with pride of what their country has achieved, even as they feared it might be at the expense of roots and identity. Between the two stand those who see Baku as an extension of Europe, and who would rather not look too long into the mirror of the past.

In Baku the roads are wide and the buildings tall and handsome, many of them glass façades in which a blurred image of the city's identity is reflected. On its edges there are attractive houses of one or two storeys, small markets crowded with Persian carpets and Turkish cafés, and women carrying shopping bags, very few of them in hijab. A visitor quickly senses that Baku is trying to be European at any price.

Although Azerbaijan appears to be a country that knows what it wants in economy and construction, and has seen a striking surge of development in recent decades, its society did not strike me as entirely sure of itself where religion, values and identity are concerned. That hesitation shows not only in how women dress, but extends to ways of life, to education and to political orientation, including the close rapprochement with Israel. Between these divergent choices, between certainty and hesitation, the cracks have widened, so that a visitor sometimes feels a stranger in this beautiful country, which seems to me confused in its relationship with its own roots.

To understand what lies behind this picture, one has to go back a little. Azerbaijan emerged, like the other Soviet republics, from a long experience that left religion under suspicion. Many mosques were closed during it or turned into warehouses and museums, and religious observance was portrayed as the remnant of a backward past that ought to be left behind. Even so, religion did not vanish from people's lives. It remained present at occasions, in the language of grandmothers, and in practices that many regard as social custom: fasting, celebrating the feasts, reciting the Qur'an at funerals, and the rites of marriage and death.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, mosques returned to activity, some religious schools opened, and books flowed in from Turkey, Iran and the Arab world. Society entered a phase of searching for itself. Some of its people returned to the details of religious practice, others confined themselves to the outward forms attached to social occasions, while broad groups remained in a middle ground between the two.

Anyone who travels the country finds that Azerbaijani society is religious in its own way. It is neither conservative in the familiar sense, nor secular as one might imagine if one judged Azerbaijan by European Baku alone. People still fast, marry and bury their dead according to Islamic tradition, and know what is lawful and what is forbidden; but they carry at the same time the marks of seventy years of official atheism, until for many religion has become closer to cultural memory than to a way of life grounded in the teachings of Islam.

Literature is perhaps the truest witness to the depth of that memory, for it preserved what time could not erase. Azerbaijani poetry is evidence that piety, Sufism and the values of chastity are centuries older than the Soviet Union, and that they remained present in the popular imagination, in verse passed down the generations and sung at gatherings and occasions. Shah Ismail Khatai, one of the masters of Azerbaijani Sufi poetry in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, wrote of divine love, of the purification of the soul and of spiritual meanings, and his poetry remains part of the Azerbaijani cultural inheritance. In the villages and small towns, life still keeps much of its religious feeling and its simplicity.

With the beginning of the twentieth century and the spread of journalism and reform, voices appeared that criticised the rigidity of some clerics and what had come to be tied to social backwardness, and calls rose for the education of women and their inclusion in public life. Jalil Mammadguluzadeh was among the most prominent of those voices, using literature and satirical journalism to criticise ignorance, despotism and the customs that deprived women of education and of a part in society. For him the question was not dress so much as a refusal of the coercion of women, their isolation and the denial of their rights.

Then came the Soviet era, with its constriction of religion and its mockery of religious forms and rites, imposing another conception of the liberation of women, bound in part to removing them from religious symbols. In Baku today there stands a statue from that period of a woman casting off her veil, a witness to a time when the state tried to manufacture freedom by statue and decree. Yet the literature that survived in homes and gatherings, the modesty that persisted in dress and custom, and the poetry that went on being recited, were not erased by decrees. Society did not abandon its religion altogether, even if the forms of expressing it changed.

It was not surprising, then, that the hijab spread again after independence, driven by an openness to different cultures through travel, study and the media, and by a desire to assert identity after Soviet domination ended. This return was not simply a return to the past. It carried new religious and social meanings, and reflected the effort of some young women to express their identity away from both the Soviet and the Western model.

In Azerbaijan today one can observe three generations of women in hijab: grandmothers who cover their heads by inherited custom, a generation that came to know religion after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a young generation that chose the hijab amid wider knowledge and technological change. These choices may be found within a single family: the mother or grandmother wearing a traditional covering, while the daughter chooses the hijab out of religious conviction, or leans towards very liberal dress and sees the hijab as a relic of the past.

During my visits I noticed that the forms of hijab and of modest dress differ by region and by generation. Friends from different areas told me that the young women in their conservative families are careful to dress modestly, even when they do not cover their heads. In Baku the hijab seemed to me less present. That may be partly because my visits to the city were mostly official and my meetings concentrated in institutions; but even while walking about the city, I rarely came across young women in hijab.

This background is necessary to understand what is happening today. The hijab in Azerbaijan is not merely a piece of clothing that can be separated from the history of the society. It is one of the outward forms that hold within them the society's troubled relationship with its religious past and with its modern image.

The question of banning the hijab in Azerbaijani schools is not new. In December 2010 restrictions on it provoked wide protests, and the issue returned in March 2026, when girls in hijab were prevented from entering some schools, among them schools in the village of Mehdiabad. What had been practised unevenly later found legislative and regulatory cover: in July 2026 the general education law was amended, and in September new rules on school uniform were issued, resting on the principle of the secularity of education without mentioning the hijab explicitly.

This is where the problem lies. It does not look like mere vagueness in legal drafting, but a method that allows the ban to pass without being named. The rules are framed in general terms, their application is then left to school administrations, and so pupils and teachers in hijab are refused entry at some institutions while the practice differs at others. In this way the ban becomes a practical reality, even if it is never announced as such.

These measures provoked wide protests, and the authorities announced the detention of thirty-seven people in Baku, while video clips and testimonies circulating on social media revealed the scale of the confusion and contradiction in how the matter was handled, and the harsh effect the decision left on the pupils and their families.

Here we return to the clouded mirror in which Baku looks at itself. This is a society in which some 96 per cent of the population identify as Muslims, however much the degrees of their piety and practice differ. In the Islamic culture that forms one of the foundations of this society, chastity, modesty and the safeguarding of dignity hold a central place in the upbringing of a girl and in ordering her relationship with society. Woman, in this conception, is not a body displayed to the gaze, nor is her worth reduced to her beauty or appearance; she is honoured for her humanity, her mind, her character and her place in the family and in society.

I regard the hijab as belonging within this integrated vision of chastity and the safeguarding of dignity, not as a substitute for the laws that protect women from harassment and assault, but as part of a wider moral, educational and social order. Experience has shown that legislation alone, however advanced, is not enough to put an end to violence, harassment and exploitation, unless it is supported by a culture that respects the human person, the body and privacy. Hence the importance of an upbringing in chastity and modesty, not as the responsibility of women alone, but as values that govern the conduct of men and women together, and that work alongside the rules of lowering the gaze, guarding what is inviolable, mutual support, and the protection of the family and of society.

From this starting point, I hold that the school in a Muslim society should be a space for upbringing, learning and good conduct, an extension of the authentic values in which a girl is raised at home, not an arena in which she collides with her beliefs. When the school's messages contradict what she has been brought up on, she finds herself before two opposing images, torn between what she was raised to be and what she is asked to become.

There is no dispute about the state's right to regulate its public institutions, but that right should not become a means of exclusion. The Azerbaijani constitution itself guarantees the right to education in Article 42, and Article 48 protects freedom of conscience and belief, while Article 71 requires that restrictions on rights and freedoms rest on law and be proportionate to the aim pursued. It is not easy to justify depriving a pupil of her place in the classroom because of a head covering, or to treat the abandonment of an outward sign of her belief as a condition for entering the school.

The neutrality of an educational institution concerns the nature of the state, its curricula and its authority to administer education; it does not necessarily require stripping pupils of their personal beliefs. A secular school can preserve its curricula and its order without making the hijab an obstacle to a girl's education. Yet this distinction between the neutrality of the institution and the freedom of the individual appears to be absent from the Azerbaijani decision, where secularism turns from a framework that should accommodate the differences among citizens into a single image that everyone is required to match.

The matter becomes graver still when we recall Azerbaijan's international obligations. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as interpreted by the Human Rights Committee in General Comment No. 22, protects a person's right to manifest belief through clothing and head coverings, and permits restricting that freedom only under specific legal conditions in which necessity and proportionality are observed. In Hudoyberganova v. Uzbekistan in 2004, the Committee found that preventing a student from continuing her studies because of her hijab, without sufficient justification, constituted a violation of freedom of religion.

Ironically, Azerbaijan is reproducing an experience that stirred controversy in other societies, and that showed that banning the hijab does not end piety, and may deepen attachment to its symbols. The problem appears to run deeper than the regulation of dress, because the hijab has become a site of contention in which religious, political, social and economic considerations are entangled.

For the observant Muslim woman it is an obligation of her faith, a symbol of her belonging and of her family's values, while the authorities see in it a religious manifestation whose presence in public institutions they seek to control. This conflict has social and economic consequences too, because depriving girls of education threatens their future chances of work, income and economic independence, and may push some of them into precarity and poverty, in line with Azerbaijan's secular doctrine.

The deeper dimension of this problem remains the question of identity. Azerbaijan is a country in whose memory Turkic, Persian, Russian, Caucasian and Soviet currents are interwoven, while its capital is drawn to a European gleam. This diversity is not in itself a problem; there are societies able to take in several civilisational currents without losing their character, such as Malaysia, where almost half the population belong to different religions and cultures and where the hijab is nevertheless honoured like a crown on every girl's head. The problem begins when openness turns into a rupture with one's roots, and when religious signs are treated as an obstacle to progress.

I sensed this inclination in the shape and rhythm of Baku, where pride in heritage seemed more present in architecture, music and festivals than in dress and in ways of living. It is as though the past were summoned to decorate the city, yet is not always welcome when it appears in people's convictions and daily choices. Heritage becomes beautiful when it is hung on walls, and unsettling when a girl wears it on her way to school.

In the midst of this crisis stands the position of the mufti, Sheikh Allahshukur Pashazadeh, head of the Caucasus Muslims Board, who in remarks reported on 13 October affirmed the religious importance of the hijab, but at the same time called for respect for the decisions of the state, and criticised the turning of schools into arenas of protest, while noting citizens' right to express their views and to address officials.

This position can be understood as an attempt to combine an affirmation of the religious ruling with the avoidance of a collision with the state, but it also exposes the predicament of scholars under an authority that narrows the space for opinion. A call to respect the decision, even if the mufti did not intend by it to endorse the ban, may lend it a moral cover that weakens objection to it, and leaves the girl caught between her religious conviction and an administrative decision that bars her from school. In this way the preservation of the religious position becomes part of a complicated equation whose cost she alone bears, while her right to education hangs between what she holds to be a religious duty and what the authorities permit.

The crisis has an extension beyond Azerbaijan's borders. Despite its membership of Islamic organisations and its Muslim majority, Azerbaijan is careful to keep its political identity apart from religious affiliation, while within the society itself conceptions of Islam and of its role in the state and in public life differ.

Turkey occupies a particular place in this equation. The relationship between the two countries goes beyond language and history to strategic partnerships and major regional interests. Yet when Turkish criticism was voiced over the restrictions imposed on the hijab, Baku treated it as interference in its internal affairs and as resting on distorted information.

The irony is that Baku knows well, and at close quarters, that Turkey itself lived through decades of conflict over the hijab before the restrictions on it were gradually rolled back. It might have drawn from that experience a lesson about the danger of turning dress into a measure of loyalty to the state or of a society's modernity; but Baku seems to be walking the same road again, without disclosing its intentions.

This sensitivity clearly expresses a fear of a widening religious awakening within society. The fear is not of a piece of cloth or a school uniform, but of the intellectual and social shifts that the spread of the hijab may signal, and of the voices calling for a reconsideration of the place of religion after decades of its removal from the public sphere.

As for the relationship with Israel, in place since the 1990s and extending to security, technology and agriculture, it opens another door onto Azerbaijan's geopolitical choices. Surrounded by a complex regional neighbourhood, Azerbaijan chose to build a close partnership with Israel in order to strengthen its capabilities and its strategic position. One cannot assert that this relationship lies behind the restrictions imposed on the hijab, but a state's external choices are never entirely separate from its conception of its identity and of the place of religion in its society.

Religious consciousness, when it passes beyond individual practice into a moral and political position on Islamic causes, among them the Palestinian cause and relations with Israel, may become a source of anxiety for an authority that wishes to control the religious sphere and keep it from influencing its strategic choices. And so a girl in a small school in Baku finds herself, without knowing it and without wishing it, at the heart of an equation far larger than her head covering, one in which calculations of power, identity and regional interest are intertwined.

Azerbaijan is not an exception on this path. In France a law of 2004 banned conspicuous religious symbols in public schools; in Turkey women in hijab endured decades of restrictions before they were gradually lifted; while Quebec's Bill 21 of 2019 imposed restrictions on the wearing of religious symbols by categories of public employees, among them teachers.

Despite the differing political and legal contexts of these experiences, they reflect a recurring conflict between the idea of institutional neutrality and freedom of belief. In my view, some of these policies conceal a fear of religion's return to the public sphere, not merely as individual observance, but as a source of values, of awareness and of social choices. It is a fear that drives some states to fight the outward religious sign instead of addressing the questions raised by its renewed presence.

Amid all these calculations, the voice of the pupils themselves is all but absent. Not every girl in hijab is a political activist, and not every one of them carries a programme of opposition. Many want nothing more than to complete their education while keeping what expresses their convictions. Yet they find themselves forced to choose between education and identity, as though one of the two rights could be realised only by surrendering the other.

I return here to the scene from which I began, to beautiful Baku with its wide streets and glass façades, and with its ambition towards modernity and progress. It is a city that has managed to build for itself a striking architectural and economic image, but which, as it seems to me, has not yet settled its relationship with everything its memory holds of values and belonging.

The diversity the city takes pride in is not complete if it cannot make room for a girl who wants to enter her school in hijab. Progress is not measured only by the towers, roads and institutions a state erects, but by its capacity to protect people from exclusion, and to respect their right to keep their identity while taking part in building their country's future.

A state that needs to exclude a girl in order to feel secure about the neutrality of its institutions does not appear strong so much as anxious. And a modernity that makes the abandonment of one's roots a condition does not necessarily produce a freer society; it may deepen that society's estrangement from itself.

What is painful in all this is that Azerbaijan, while seeking to free itself from its past, returns to some of that past's instruments in dealing with religion. It has moved beyond the Soviet era in construction, economy and politics, but it has not yet freed itself from some of that era's conceptions of the human person and of freedom. Here lies the real crisis: the problem is not the hijab of a girl who wants to enter her school, but a state that has not yet made peace with all the components of its identity, and that fights everything connected to its past and its identity.