Over the past few weeks, images from Azerbaijan have proliferated across social media. Videos show girls in tears at the gates of their own schools, hugging their teachers and other students as they’re turned away. Some schools have seen boycotts, and parents have joined the protests. Scores of people have been detained – 37 in Baku alone, according to the Interior Ministry, and more than 200, according to activists.
The reason behind all this tension is a new dress code for public schools, issued on Sept. 21, that bars clothing said to violate the “principle of secularism.” The regulation does not specifically name the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, but this is clearly the prime target of the policy. No wonder the Azerbaijani Education Ministry shared a video that put a green check mark next to students without religious headgear, and a red cross next to those with the hijab or prayer caps.
Aside from stirring up emotions inside the country, this “headscarf ban” in public schools has also triggered a crisis between Azerbaijan and its long-time ally Turkey. The two nations, with an almost-common language and a long history of ethno-religious brotherhood, have deep ties that even gave rise to the phrase “one nation, two states.” But Baku’s headscarf policy has enraged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his party, and his political base. Turkish officials and pro-government media have strongly criticized the ban. In return, their Azeri counterparts have sent back strongly worded warnings against Turkey to stay out of their “domestic affairs.”
But banning the hijab to defeat “political Islam” – a common passion among staunch secularists – is like throwing fuel on a fire, hoping that it will extinguish it. Instead, it often gives Islamists a new cause, a new impetus.
Of course, non-interference in the domestic policies of nations is a good principle. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be criticized. In fact, in the modern world there are universal values of human rights by which every state can be questioned, criticized, and advised. Some of these values are codified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), whose famous Article 18 protects the freedom to manifest one’s religion.
It is worth noting that, like most other states in the world, Azerbaijan is a party to the ICCPR. So, here are some thoughts – and criticisms – on the headscarf ban in light of the very principle it has pledged to uphold.
First, the religious freedom declared by Article 18 includes “the freedom of individuals to wear attire in accordance with their religion or belief,” as explained in a report, titled Religious Garb Restrictions and International Human Rights Law, issued by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The report notes that states should refrain from “either prohibiting or mandating the wearing of religious garb,” such as “Muslim women wearing the hijab, Sikh men wearing the turban, Jewish men wearing the kippah, and Christians displaying the cross.” The “Islamic” regimes in Iran and Afghanistan are notorious for mandating religious garb, but the opposite, prohibiting it, is similarly wrong. (No wonder USCIRF just issued a criticism of Azerbaijan’s “public school uniform rules,” which “unfairly exclude or expel young Muslim girls who wear the hijab.”)
Second, there is a common counter-argument to this view: that Muslim women and especially younger girls are forced to wear the hijab by their families or their communities. There may be some truth to this claim, which should be addressed on its own, but it still doesn’t justify government prohibitions of the hijab, for two reasons. For one, many Muslim females do wear the headgear willingly, believing that it is a religious obligation they want to fulfill. For another, a government dictate can’t remedy a social one — it only adds a second layer of coercion. A Muslim teenager who is forced to wear a headscarf by her family doesn’t get “liberated” when she is also turned away by the secular schools and ends up being deprived of public education.
A third counter-argument is that the hijab is a flag of “political Islam” that challenges secular governments – which seems to reflect Azerbaijan’s main concern on this issue. Azerbaijani state television, for instance, defended the new rules by declaring: “The state will block any attempt to inject Arab-Persian values into our national identity.” This was widely taken as a reference to fundamentalist movements originating in the Arab world and Iran. Iran’s influence, especially, has long been an understandable concern for Azerbaijan, which shares not just a long border with Iran, but also a common sect – Shiism, the dominant creed in both – as well as ethnic ties with the millions of Iranian Azeris.
But banning the hijab to defeat “political Islam” – a common passion among staunch secularists – is like throwing fuel on a fire, hoping that it will extinguish it. Instead, it often gives Islamists a new cause, a new impetus. (No wonder Iran began using Azerbaijan’s hijab ban in its propaganda against its northern neighbor right away.)
That is because the hijab – traditional garb worn by most observant Muslim women for centuries – was often politicized in modern contexts where it was disparaged and banned by secularist forces in the first place. An early example was French Algeria: In 1958, colonial authorities staged public “unveiling” ceremonies, and the veil soon became, as Frantz Fanon observed in his 1965 essay “Algeria Unveiled,” a symbol of Algerian resistance.
Another eye-opening example is Iran itself, where the Islamist dictate to wear the headscarf – a hallmark of the Iranian Revolution – was preceded by the secularist dictate to take it off. In 1936, Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, issued a decree known as Kashf-e hijab (“unveiling”), under which police were ordered to physically remove the veil from any woman who wore it in public. The Shah thought he was “modernizing” Iran with such draconian laws – but he only triggered an Islamist reaction that would ultimately dethrone his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
A similar, though much milder, political pendulum swing took place in Turkey, where the secularist elite, following in the footsteps of Turkey’s first President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (a good friend of Reza Shah) dictated a strict secularism called laiklik, derived from the French term laïcité. One of its hallmarks was banning the headscarf in public institutions, including universities, from the 1980s until the 2010s, in order to curb “political Islam.”
But this authoritarian policy – opposed not just by religious conservatives but also by secular liberals – only ended up empowering “political Islam,” which ultimately came to power in 2002. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by Erdoğan, has been in power ever since. And while the AKP’s early years of political reform and economic growth were later increasingly replaced by authoritarianism, incompetence, and corruption, many conservative Turks still vote for it, because they don’t want to go back to the “Old Turkey,” where their headscarves were banned and their prayer caps were ridiculed.
Some other countries, including Turkey, have already gone through this self-defeating authoritarianism, and the bitter lessons are all too visible. Azerbaijan would be wise not to insist on repeating the same mistakes, and to back off from the headscarf ban, for its own good.
Notably, at least some of Turkey’s secularists now realize that their decades-old headscarf ban was a big mistake. One of them is none other than Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the CHP, the arch-secularist main opposition party. He has recently lost some prestige in his own camp, as he returned to the leadership only through a controversial court ruling, widely seen as a manipulation by the establishment, but his liberal take on secularism, which has a longer pedigree, is noteworthy. On Oct. 13, he spoke at his party’s group meeting in the Turkish Parliament, appealing directly to Azerbaijan:
My dear Azerbaijani brothers and sisters.… We lived through this pain. This pain must end. It is not right to divide women into those whose heads are covered and those whose heads are uncovered. Turkey went through a very heavy trial on this issue, and we, too, bore responsibility in it. As someone who has undertaken this responsibility, I am addressing Azerbaijan: Let women be free, let them choose what they want to wear.
Indeed, letting women “choose what they want to wear” is the right path for Azerbaijan – as it is for Iran, Afghanistan, and any other country that arrogates to itself the power to dictate to its citizens how they should live. Otherwise, every dictate of the state to create the ideal kind of citizen only tramples on the freedom of those who differ, creating social traumas and political reactions, ending up sowing deep divisions and fierce oppositions.
Some other countries, including Turkey, have already gone through this self-defeating authoritarianism, and the bitter lessons are all too visible. Azerbaijan would be wise not to insist on repeating the same mistakes, and to back off from the headscarf ban, for its own good.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
