Azerbaijan School Headscarf Ban Sparks Turkish Diplomatic Row

There is a scarf across this schoolgirl’s head. The Azerbaijani government looks at it and says, “I see no reason for it; let us remove it.” The wiser man says, “If you see no reason for it, you are the last person who should be holding the scissors. Go home and find out why her grandmother wore one, and why her mother, after seventy years of commissars, put one on again.”

The curious thing is that the government in Baku believes it is the one guarding a fence. It is right, after a fashion. The secular state of Azerbaijan was built for a reason, and the reason is not stupid: a small country squeezed between larger and more pious neighbours has every cause to fear that the mosque will be used as a doorway by somebody else’s foreign ministry. The strongest case for the ban is a case about sovereignty, not about cloth. A minister may reasonably fear that a classroom full of covered heads is the first sentence of a sermon written abroad. I grant the fear. I do not grant the remedy, because the remedy confuses the fence with the field it was meant to protect.

The schoolroom secularism of the old republic was a fence around the state, keeping the clergy out of the ministries. It was never meant to be a fence around the child, keeping her family out of her wardrobe. When the state picks up the scarf, it reaches past the mosque and into the kitchen where a mother pinned it that morning. That is not a defence of the household against foreign priests. It is the state doing the very thing it accuses the priests of doing, which is telling a family what its daughter must believe about her own head.

And here Turkey enters, wearing the expression of a reformed burglar lecturing a householder on locks. For a long stretch of its modern history, Ankara forbade the headscarf in its own universities and public offices, for exactly the reasons Baku now gives. It tore that fence down only after discovering that the women it had excluded were not a conspiracy but a majority. Turkey’s diplomats are therefore the only people in this quarrel who actually know what the fence was for, because they built it, maintained it, and watched it fail. Their protest is hypocritical, and it is also the best evidence in the case.

So the protests are not a revolt against secularism. They are the ordinary family in Azerbaijan, which rarely marches anywhere, saying that the state’s fence has wandered onto their land. It is the government that has moved the boundary.

Somewhere in Baku this autumn a girl stands at the school gate, deciding whether to fold the scarf into her satchel or walk home with it on. Whatever she chooses, the state has taught her its first real lesson: that it cannot tell a frontier from a hairpin.