“You are telling me, I can’t come to school?” says a teenage girl in a navy blue Islamic headscarf, captured on video challenging a staff member at the entrance to her school.
The footage has been shared widely on social media, and shows a group of girls in hijabs standing behind her applauding as she continues: “Why should I have to give up my religion?”
Last Monday the education ministry in Azerbaijan began enforcing new uniform rules, turning away female pupils wearing hijabs. Protests began outside state schools in the capital, Baku, and in several southern districts including Masally and Jalilabad.
Protests are rare in this oil- and gas-producing country of 10.5 million people.
Azerbaijan is constitutionally secular and the government strongly enforces that.
President Ilham Aliyev has been in power since 2003 and has little tolerance for dissent. Opposition politicians and many independent journalists are in jail.
Azerbaijan is pulled between two neighbours, Turkey and Iran. Azerbaijanis belong to a Turkic group of nations, speaking a language close to Turkish, and Turkey is its closest ally.
But like Iran to the south, Azerbaijan is mainly Shia – over 60% of its people identify as Shia Muslims, while most Turks are Sunni.
The interior ministry said it had detained 37 people on Monday who tried to obstruct the rules and “grossly violate public order”.
The rules, approved on 21 September, ban clothing which contradict “the principle of secularism in education” in state schools. They do not mention the hijab. Similar guidelines were extended to teachers on 6 October.
In one video, pupils outside School No. 69 in Balakhany, outside Baku, hold a banner reading: “The hijab does not prevent anyone from getting an education.”
Shahiza Huseynova, a mother who was protesting outside a school in the Mashtaga district of the capital, was detained on Tuesday.
In an interview with Meydan TV, an independent Azerbaijani-language channel based in Germany, Huseynova’s husband Agha said she had been given a warning: “Either you take off your child’s hijab and send them to school, or you go to prison.”
Friends have also lost contact with Ilkin Huseynov, an activist who on Tuesday launched an online platform called “Let Leyli Go to School”. It offers free lessons from volunteer teachers to pupils barred from class.
According to a friend, Huseynov left his home in Baku with unidentified men at about 16:00 on Wednesday, and his phone has been switched off ever since.
The authorities have not commented, but friends believe he has been detained. On Thursday, the platform’s Instagram page could not be accessed.
Since the protests began, users have reported problems accessing Instagram and TikTok without a virtual private network (VPN).
Most of the protests have been in religiously conservative neighbourhoods in Baku’s outlying settlements and in southern districts near the 765km (475-mile) border with Iran.
The authorities have long been wary of religious influence from Iran, where more ethnic Azerbaijanis live than in Azerbaijan itself.
On the night of 13 October, Azerbaijan’s State Service for Special Communications and Information Security said a “foreign hacker group” had attacked more than 100 state websites.
A pro-Iranian group calling itself the 313 Team (Cyber Islamic Resistance) claimed responsibility.
Azerbaijani officials have defended the rules. One MP, Nigar Arpadarai, told the 1news.az website that children did not choose to wear the hijab themselves but were influenced by their families.
“A child has no freedom to choose a religion. This is a conscious prerogative of adults,” she said.
The row has now spilled over into Turkey, Baku’s closest ally, which provided vital support during Azerbaijan’s 2020 war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The two countries call themselves “one nation, two states”.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a devout Muslim, has spoken of creating a “pious generation”.
His chief adviser, Oktay Saral, has called the Azerbaijani restrictions “unacceptable” and urged Baku to “reverse this mistake”.
“A headscarf is not an obstacle; it is a requirement of one’s faith!” Saral wrote on X.
Several MPs from Turkey’s governing AK Party joined in.
Small demonstrations were held outside Azerbaijan’s embassy in Ankara, organised by Köklü Değişim, an Islamist movement linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir, and outside its consulate in Istanbul, organised by conservative Islamist group Özgür-Der.
President Aliyev’s New Azerbaijan Party accused Turkish officials of an “openly defamatory” information campaign and of “baseless accusations”, warning that Oktay Saral’s comments risked harming ties, and cautioned against interference in Azerbaijan’s internal affairs.
Earlier this month, Ilham Aliyev himself said no one should “stick their noses into our way of life”.
Behind the dispute there may lie another source of friction. Turkish protesters have linked the headscarf rules to Azerbaijan’s close ties with Israel, which sells weapons to Baku and buys Azerbaijani oil.
Turkey’s relations with Israel have collapsed over Gaza, but Azerbaijan has tried to maintain relationships with both countries.
That is a difficult balancing act. On Thursday, when Israel’s President Isaac Herzog addressed a regional security summit hosted by Azerbaijan in Baku, delegations from Turkey, Iran and other countries walked out of the hall.