Azerbaijan’s official ban on Islamic headscarfs in public schools has backfired. The latest ban was introduced by a decision of the Cabinet of Ministers on September 21, 2026, and its enforcement started in October. Teachers and students with headscarfs were dragged out of schools and were banned from entering their classes. In reaction, they started protesting. Dozens of arrests did not stop the protests from expanding, as students and parents joined the protests, turning it into spontaneous demonstrations against the Azerbaijani government.
With protests spreading, police repression was also mounting. Media reports on October 12 put the number of arrests at 37, while the next day reports put the number of hijab arrests as over 200. Access to social media was also restricted, to limit the spread of the unrest; yet videos of the confrontations between schoolgirls wearing headscarfs and policemen circulated, causing collective indignation. The question is: will the hijab protests overlap with other socio-economic resentments and spread both geographically and to different social groups? The other question will be whether police repression will be enough to stop the protests, or whether Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev will force to abandon headscarf ban, and mark his first political defeat in many years?
The hijab crisis itself is the result of ill-judgement by Ilham Aliyev. He already introduced such a ban in 2010 only to abandon it after continuous protests. Now, and after dismantling the nationalist opposition, and secular civil society organizations, sending most of them to prison and exile, Ilham Aliyev felt invincible. Yet, Azerbaijani elites never understood the popular appeal of Islam. The country is ruled by secular, Russian-speaking, urban elite which is unable to grasp the social dimension of Islam, which is rural or suburban, lower-class and poorer, less educated, and Azeri-speaking. The post-Soviet elite well represented by the Aliyev dynasty, with its class bias, is unable to even recognize that another form of Azerbaijani identity is possible.
In a time where political Islam is in retreat elsewhere in the Middle East (because it was transformed from dissenting force to power, with little substance to offer), Ilham Aliyev with his political choices managed to make Islam a force of anti-authoritarian revolt.
Tensions with Turkey
Another surprise is that the hijab ban did not create tensions between Azerbaijan and the neighbouring Islamic Republic of Iran, but between Azerbaijan and its close ally Turkey. While leaders of both countries enjoy repeating that Azerbaijan and Turkey are “one nation, two states”, the ideological and sociological differences between the two is now evident. A growing anti-Azerbaijan campaign has been brewing in Turkish media and social networks. The ruling AKP in Turkey is a Sunni, Islamist party, that came to power struggling against secular-nationalist elites. The struggle against headscarf ban is central to AKP, and even a “post-modern” military coup in 1997 that overthrew the Islamist government of Necmettin Erbakan back then. Now, many AKP politicians identify with the victims of the Aliyev regime, and not with the regime itself.
The polemic between Turkey and Azerbaijan reached a high when on October 12 Oktay Saral, an advisor to the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, publicly condemned Azerbaijani headscarf repression as morally and legally unjustified. This echoed an earlier speech by Erdogan in September at the UN General assembly where he criticized school headscarf bans globally as restrictions of fundamental rights. The ruling New Azerbaijan Party came out with a statement criticising Saral and calling him not to intervene in the internal affairs of Azerbaijan.
Turkey and Azerbaijan also clash on the issue of alliance with Israel and the conflict in Gaza. It is not clear why Turkey became increasingly irritated by the close cooperation between Azerbaijan and Israel. Only last year, when relations between Turkey and Israel were tense because of Syria, Azerbaijan served as a mediator and two meetings took place in Baku played in 2025 to determine mechanisms to exchange information over Syria. Azerbaijan also played an important role to pressure Israel not to recognize the 1915 Armenian Genocide, which Netanyahu was using to pressure Erdogan. Azerbaijani attempt to become a bridge and mediator between Turkey and Israel is becoming increasingly difficult.
End of the “iron fist”
It is also surprising that the internal crisis of Azerbaijan came so soon – only three years after the “Iron Fist” of Aliyev won the Karabakh conflict. Ilham Aliyev had inherited the country from his father the Soviet-era ruler Heydar Aliyev back in 2003, establishing a dynastic rule. His military victories in the Karabakh conflict in 2020-2023 gave him a new legitimacy, and unprecedented concentration of power in his own person.
It is also surprising to see the current political crisis in Azerbaijan, even before the country enters its systemic crisis. Azerbaijan heavily depends on oil and gas (over 90% of exports), and while oil production is in decline, the hydrocarbon prices are very high due to the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and state treasury are full of petrodollars. Therefore, the current crisis is the result of ill-advised policies, and problems of governance where all decisions are taken by one person. In the last three years, since the total ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, most of the population of Azerbaijan discovered that the problems they were facing in their daily lives was not because of the conflict with Armenia. It was because of the authoritarian political system of their own country. With the hijab crisis, Azerbaijan already entered a new stage, and the internal political, social, and normative crisis will be here to stay.
