Azerbaijan School Headscarf Ban Sparks Turkish Diplomatic Row

There is a gate across the schoolhouse door in Azerbaijan, and the government has decided it is not a gate at all but a piece of cloth. It has ordered the cloth removed. Before agreeing, a sensible person should ask why so many families wrapped it round their daughters’ heads in the first place. Until someone can answer, he has no business at the door.

The Azerbaijani government has a better case than its critics allow, and it deserves a hearing. A secular state on the border of louder theocracies may reasonably fear that a headscarf is less a prayer than a flag, raised by foreign patrons and pinned on girls too young to choose it. On this view the ban is itself a fence, put up to keep the schoolroom neutral ground. That is a real argument and not a stupid one. It fails all the same, and it fails by its own logic.

A neutral schoolroom is valuable because it lets a child from a devout home and a child from a doubting one sit at the same desk. Its purpose is to keep the family’s faith and the state’s curriculum from fighting over the child. Once the state takes the scarf from her head, the schoolroom is no longer neutral. It has become the front line. The government built a fence to keep politics out of the classroom and has put the classroom into politics. Ordinary families had been doing that work quietly with a square of fabric for generations.

The proof is the noise. Azerbaijan does not have protests the way England has weather. They are rare, and the rulers of a country are entitled to be startled when they come. People who have spent years not marching do not take to the streets over a matter of school uniform. They march when they feel something load-bearing has been pulled out, something they never needed to defend because no one had touched it. The protest is the sound of the reformer learning what the fence was holding up.

Then there is Turkey, whose diplomats have taken offence. Turkey spent decades keeping scarves out of its own universities and has since discovered that the policy was a fence nobody could explain to the grandmothers. A neighbour who has already torn down the wall and seen the consequences is not meddling when he shouts across the garden. He is giving evidence.

Somewhere tonight a girl in Baku is folding her scarf on a chair and setting her alarm. In the morning she will decide, at the school gate, which of her two instructors she must disobey. The ministry believes it gave her freedom. In practice it has made a twelve-year-old choose between her family’s faith and the state’s school.