Sparks: School headscarf ban sparks rare protests in Azerbaijan and row with Turkey
A state that cannot tolerate a square of cloth on a schoolgirl's head has revealed which of its institutions rests on fear rather than consent, and fear requires enforcement budgets that grow with every grievance they suppress.
The claim is that the school must be free of the headscarf to be neutral, yet examine this neutrality and find it depends on the very religious conditions it declares itself independent of - neither secular, nor religious, nor both, nor neither.
The matter is this: a government that turns a child away from learning because of what she wears has mistaken its authority over schools for an authority over consciences, and no people should forgive the confusion.
Watch the crowd gather as you watch dust motes swarm in a sunbeam - no demon commands it, only countless small grievances, each a particle, colliding until the whole air of the state appears to move.
They banned the cloth from the classroom to protect the children's minds, then filled the streets with police - I have seen men guard the door against a scarf while letting tyranny walk in bareheaded.
That a state, having undertaken to educate the minds of its children, should then exclude any of them for the cloth upon her head - this inverts the very purpose for which schools are erected among free peoples.
'Pupils wearing hijabs turned away from schools' - note the passive construction: no one turns them away, the door simply closes itself, and somewhere between the rule and the verb, the official who wrote it vanishes.
There is a gate across the schoolyard door, and before we cheer the men who built it we ought to ask what danger they imagined a twelve-year-old's headscarf posed, for I suspect they cannot answer and built the gate anyway.
They turned the girls away at the door and called it order; I have stood before such doors, and I tell you the cloth does not burn, the girl does not burn, but the idea walks past every gate they build.
Things that are hateful: a rule that measures a child's devotion by the cloth on her head; a ministry that mistakes a girl for a flag; protesters in the street and officials pretending the street is empty.
At the school gates I would note the inventory of a protest: mothers with folded arms, girls in headscarves holding their books against their chests like passports, and officials consulting paperwork that no one present believes explains anything.
Everyone in this debate treats school neutrality as natural, but ask whose history established a bare head as the default and a covered one as the exception, and the common sense reveals itself as the sense of whoever won earlier.
Watch the routes, not the speeches: the girls know which doors open for them and which do not, and a people who map the exclusions by sundown are already halfway to refusing them by morning.
A girl stands at the school door with the cold coming off the pavement and a rule in her face, and from where she stands the argument about secularism looks exactly like one more wind that blows only on the poor.