"You are telling me, I can't come to school?" says a teenage girl in a navy blue Islamic headscarf, captured on video challenging a staff member at the entrance to her school. The footage has been shared widely on social media, and shows a group of girls in hijabs standing behind her applauding as she continues: "Why should I have to give up my religion?" Last Monday the education ministry in Azerbaijan began enforcing new uniform rules, turning away female pupils wearing hijabs. Protests began outside state schools in the capital, Baku, and in several southern districts including Masally and Jalilabad.
Protests are rare in this oil- and gas-producing country of 10.5 million people. Azerbaijan is constitutionally secular and the government strongly enforces that. President Ilham Aliyev has been in power since 2003 and has little tolerance for dissent.
Opposition politicians and many independent journalists are in jail. Azerbaijan is pulled between two neighbours, Turkey and Iran. Azerbaijanis belong to a Turkic group of nations, speaking a language close to Turkish, and Turkey is its closest ally.
But like Iran to the south, Azerbaijan is mainly Shia - over 60% of its people identify as Shia Muslims, while most Turks are Sunni. The interior ministry said it had detained 37 people on Monday who tried to obstruct the rules and "grossly violate public order". The rules, approved on 21 September, ban clothing which contradict "the principle of secularism in education" in state schools.
They do not mention the hijab. Similar guidelines were extended to teachers on 6 October. In one video, pupils outside School No. 69 in Balakhany, outside Baku, hold a banner reading: "The hijab does not prevent anyone from getting an education." Shahiza Huseynova, a mother who was 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 channel based in Germany, Huseynova's husband Agha said she had been given a warning: "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 offers 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 ever since.
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