What changed
Azerbaijan has begun enforcing school uniform rules that turn away female pupils wearing hijabs, prompting rare protests in Baku and southern districts. The rules were approved on 21 September, extended to teachers on 6 October, and led the interior ministry to say 37 people were detained on Monday.
Why it matters
This turns a uniform dispute into a test of Azerbaijan’s tightly enforced secularism. Families now face a direct choice between removing a child’s headscarf and losing access to state education, while pupils barred from class are being offered volunteer-led lessons through the “Let Leyli Go to School” platform.
The protests are especially sensitive because they are concentrated in religiously conservative areas, including districts near Azerbaijan’s 765km border with Iran. Azerbaijan is a Shia-majority country closely allied with Sunni-majority Turkey, while its government has long been wary of religious influence from Iran.
The rules do not explicitly mention the hijab. Instead, they prohibit clothing said to contradict “the principle of secularism in education.” That wording gives officials room to present the policy as a general school standard, but the enforcement has made the headscarf the clear point of confrontation.
The government is now managing several pressures at once: detentions in the streets, pupils excluded from classrooms, an activist believed by friends to have been detained, reported problems accessing Instagram and TikTok, and a claimed attack on more than 100 state websites on 13 October. The authorities have not confirmed the activist’s detention, and the social-media and cyberattack claims remain disputed.
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