The Scarf at the School Gate

This arrangement is presented as neutral, as the secular state keeping its classrooms free of doctrine. Let us ask when that neutrality became urgent, and who profits from the consensus.

Begin with the protest itself, because it is rare. Azerbaijan is not a country where people gather in the street over policy. When they do, the cause is not doctrine. It is that the state has reached into the one territory families believed was still theirs, the body of a child walking to school. The government says it is removing a symbol. In fact it is installing one. A bare head in a classroom in Azerbaijan is now as much a sign as a covered one. It signals that the republic, and no mosque, no grandmother and no foreign capital, decides what a pupil’s appearance means.

From Baku’s standpoint the scarf is a border. Azerbaijan is a Shia-majority country with Iran on one side, and it has spent decades presenting its secularism as proof that it is not Iran. A hijab in a state school looks, to such a government, less like piety than like a small embassy of somebody else’s sovereignty. The ban is foreign policy carried out on schoolgirls.

Then Turkey objects, and the comedy begins. Ankara now presents itself as protector of the headscarf. Within living memory, Turkey kept the same garment out of its own universities and public offices, and it lifted that rule only when a new governing class needed the votes of the women it had excluded. The “one nation, two states” partnership has discovered that the two states disagree about girls’ heads. Each, conveniently, takes the position that serves its own power. The Turkish complaint is not a defence of conscience. It is the protest of a patron whose client has made a decision without asking.

Now the strongest objection, which deserves to be met rather than mocked. Some girls do not choose the scarf. Families and clerics press it on them. A school that removes it may be giving a twelve-year-old the one room where nobody claims her. This is true, and it is the only argument here with real dignity. It fails on its own terms, though. A state that cared about the girl’s choice would ask the girl. Instead it replaces the father’s rule with the ministry’s rule and calls the swap liberation. The pupil who is kept out of class for refusing has lost her education to two guardians at once.

The genealogy leaves something standing, and it is not secularism, and it is not piety. It is the claim, which neither government will speak, that a child’s head belongs to the child.

At the gate, a girl unpins her scarf, folds it into her satchel, and walks in. Three governments believe they have won.