Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.
Azerbaijan’s decision to bar headscarves from its public schools, adopted by the Cabinet of Ministers on September 21, places Baku alongside the Central Asian governments that have fought over the hijab for more than a decade. For all of them, the headscarf sits where four questions meet: who holds sovereignty over religious life, how national identity is defined, whether the secular state can hold, and who controls the institutions that speak for the faith. Each government has given the same answer. The hijab is an import, modesty belongs to the national tradition, and the public school must remain secular.
Foreign powers sharpen the question. Azerbaijan faces direct pressure from both of its large neighbors: Iran, which has long presented itself as the guardian of Azerbaijan’s Shia, and Turkey, whose Islamist commentators treat Baku’s secularism as an affront to the AKP’s own record. Central Asian governments face no comparable state-sponsored challenge to their secular order, though Turkey, Iran and the Gulf monarchies all use mosques, scholarships and religious media as instruments of soft power in the region.
In Central Asia, the pressure comes from below. The hijab is spreading, particularly among young women, and every new school year brings fresh confrontations between devout families and the state. The strongest version of the secular settlement keeps religious dress out of public schools and leaves religious life beyond them largely free, provided it stays clear of extremism and incitement. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have anchored that settlement in law, the courts and a durable public consensus, which makes them the region’s secular anchors. Their neighbors illustrate the alternatives: Tajikistan’s poor and embattled state tries to strong-arm an increasingly religious population, Turkmenistan prescribes dress by decree, and Uzbekistan enforces the same school rules while increasingly accommodating conservative Islam in other spheres.
Baku between Ankara and Tehran
The decree completes a sequence begun in July, when the Milli Majlis amended the Law on General Education to define the school system as secular and grounded in “national and universal values,” and bound pupils, teachers and parents to state dress requirements. Decision No. 309 supplies the mechanism: school pedagogical councils rule on compliance, parents answer for it, and national dress remains welcome at cultural events. The word “hijab” appears nowhere in the text, but no one in Baku misread the target. The sequence also repaired a misstep. In February and March, school directors in Sumgait, Mehdiabad and elsewhere sent hijab-wearing girls home with no legal basis, one school expelling 23 pupils in a day, and quietly relented after rights lawyers objected. Decision No. 309 now provides a legal basis.
Azerbaijan’s dispute differs from Central Asia’s in origin. It is among the least observant Muslim-majority societies in the world: Gallup has ranked it among the least religious countries anywhere, and only 1 percent of Azerbaijani Muslims told Pew they attend mosque weekly. Demand for the headscarf is concentrated in pockets of Shia observance, such as the town of Nardaran outside Baku, where Iranian influence runs deep. When the Education Ministry first tried a school ban in 2010, protests in Baku and Nardaran drew a public condemnation from the Iranian Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi. The ministry retreated, and the “hijab prisoners” jailed after later demonstrations became a cause for Iran-aligned networks. For a Shia-majority state on Iran’s border, the headscarf in the classroom is a question of sovereignty first.
Turkey’s reaction exposed the limits of “one nation, two states.” Istanbul MP Mustafa Yeneroğlu, a former AKP lawmaker, had already called the spring expulsions “systematic” and warned that Turkey’s own experience showed the path to be “a dead end.” After the decree, the Islamist monthly Baran accused Baku of reviving “100-year-old Kemalist prohibitionism,” and the pro-government daily Yeni Akit gave the story a banner headline. Within days, a Milli Majlis commission on foreign interference and Azerbaijan’s media regulator accused unnamed circles in Turkey of running a coordinated social media campaign, with real and fake accounts and targeted advertising, to turn Azerbaijanis against their government and the alliance. Neither named the subject of the posts, and both asked Ankara to act against the organizers. Baku has lodged such complaints before. Its ties with Israel have drawn sustained fire in Turkish media since the Gaza war, and in March, after a drone strike on Nakhchivan that Baku blamed on Iran, a wave of Turkish posts accused Aliyev of doing Washington’s and Israel’s bidding. Ankara’s own disinformation center blocked 41 accounts and appealed for calm.
Turkish religious conservatives react this way because they recognize the policy. The Turkish Republic enforced headscarf bans for decades, and between 2010 and 2017 the AKP dismantled them in universities, the civil service, schools, the police and the military. For the party’s base, that campaign is a founding story of rights won from an overbearing secular state. Turkish secularists argue the reverse: that the state owes minors a classroom free of religious identity markers, and that the AKP used the language of rights to advance a political program. Northern Cyprus tested that argument. When a middle school in northern Nicosia turned away a pupil in a headscarf in March 2025, Prime Minister Ünal Üstel’s government amended school regulations to permit it. Thousands marched under the slogan “Cyprus is secular and will remain secular,” the teachers’ union leader Elma Eylem called the change AKP “social engineering,” and the TRNC Constitutional Court struck the regulation down that September. A month later, Turkish Cypriots elected the opposition leader Tufan Erhürman president over Ankara’s preferred candidate. In Nicosia as in Baku, defending the secular school has become a way to mark distance from Ankara without breaking with it.
Identity, not theology
In Central Asia, the argument over the hijab is at root an argument over who defines national identity after the Soviet Union. The region’s states emerged in 1991 with Soviet-trained secular elites, populations whose Islam had been folded into custom, and a religious revival arriving from abroad through missionaries, Gulf-funded scholarships and, later, social media. Governments built official spiritual administrations to train imams and issue rulings the state could accept, and treated Islam outside those channels as a security matter. Dress became the visible border between the two. Nursultan Nazarbayev declared in 2012 that “wearing Arabic hijabs and sending our women back to the Middle Ages is not our path.” Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told the National Kurultai in 2024 that the spread of black robes was a thoughtless imitation of foreign norms rooted in fanaticism. Tajikistan’s 2024 law bans clothing “alien to national culture.” Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have all banned the face veil in public since 2023, and each state promotes a national alternative: the Kazakh kimeshek, the Kyrgyz elechek and jooluk, the Uzbek ro’mol headscarf and do’ppi skullcap, the Tajik atlas dress, and the light scarf knotted at the nape that grandmothers wore through the Soviet decades.
The pressure on these arrangements is rising because the hijab itself is gaining ground, above all among young Central Asians for whom it signals piety, modernity and a break from their parents’ Soviet-inflected Islam. Each September brings new standoffs at school gates in western Kazakhstan, the Uzbek provinces and Tajik universities. Azerbaijan has seen no comparable grassroots wave; its dispute is narrower and more geopolitical.
The more durable secular models draw their line at the door of the state. In Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and in Uzbekistan since its 2021 religion law, a woman may wear a hijab in the street, at a private workplace and in the mosque, and religious practice is broadly protected so long as it avoids what the state defines as extremism or incitement to ethnic or religious hatred. The restriction applies to the public school, the institution these states treat as the instrument of a shared civic identity.
Kazakhstan: a secular model argued in public
Kazakhstan has gone furthest in giving the secular school a constitutional footing. The new constitution, approved by referendum in March and in force since July, guarantees secular education everywhere outside religious institutions. The rule it protects, a 2016 Education Ministry uniform order barring religious attire, has produced a confrontation every September since 2017, concentrated in the more conservative west and south. The courts have fixed its terms: in 2024 the Supreme Court held that a school may not deny a girl her education, but the ministry sets the uniform and parents must comply with it. Tokayev has repeatedly called schools places for acquiring knowledge and religious belief a private matter.
This September tested the model. Education Minister Zhuldyz Suleimenova warned that private schools admitting hijabs could lose their licenses and noted that the National Security Committee sits on the enforcement commission. The state muftiate replied that covering is obligatory for girls past puberty, proposed headscarves matched to the school uniform, and then deleted the post. Olzhas Khudaibergenov, a former adviser to Tokayev, sided with the clerics. The Times of Central Asia read the episode as a split inside the establishment, with the religious camp arguing calmly and the secularists reaching for the security services.
The divide within the elite matters, yet the way it plays out makes the strongest case for Kazakhstan’s model. The dispute runs through a constitution, the courts, a ministry and a muftiate that ultimately answers to the state, and it is argued in the open. The secular side also commands a public that shares its instincts: in Pew’s survey, only 18 percent of Kazakh Muslims called religion very important in their lives.
That public has also watched the hijab promoted in ways that resembled a marketing campaign more than a religious awakening. In early 2023, several Instagram influencers with audiences in the millions, accounts built on luxury brands, beauty content and beach photos, adopted the hijab within weeks of one another and began posting religious content. Kazakh media reported that bloggers had been offered money to cover. The television host Dinara Satzhan said bloggers had told her the sums were large, and Gulnara Bazhkenova, editor-in-chief of the news site Orda, observed that the synchronized change of lifestyle looked from the outside like a marketing strategy. The muftiate denied any paid campaign, and no one established who, if anyone, was paying. The trend then reversed almost as abruptly as it began. Since late 2025, a string of Kazakh singers and bloggers have publicly removed their headscarves, several citing a long inner struggle; the million-follower blogger Aruzhan Abilova told her audience in August that she hoped God would one day allow her to cover again. For many Kazakhs, the episode reinforced the suspicion that the hijab’s spread owes as much to money and fashion as to faith.
The alternatives
On the hijab, Uzbekistan looks like its neighbors. It fines the face veil, bars the hijab from state schools and permits only a light national headscarf tied to leave the chin uncovered. On other religious questions, it has moved in the opposite direction. Since 2016, Shavkat Mirziyoyev has restored the call to prayer, cut the security services’ blacklist of suspected extremists from more than 17,500 names to about 1,350, and lifted the ban on religious dress in public. The state has also made room for pundits and preachers whose views Karimov would have treated as subversive. Kamoliddin Rabbimov, among the country’s most prominent political commentators, has praised Mirziyoyev for treating Islam as a source of national unity and welcomed the appointment of an education minister open to headscarves in schools. Abror Mukhtor Aliy, a preacher with some 1.1 million YouTube subscribers whose sermons on gender and sexuality have repeatedly provoked public outrage, has held posts at both the official Muslim Board and the state’s Center of Islamic Civilization. When one of his statements set off a public backlash, the center apologized for his remarks and then gave him a new position. The strategy co-opts the religious revival by bringing its loudest voices inside state institutions, and it gives official standing to views on women’s place that run well beyond the school uniform rules. Uzbek secularism is firm at the schoolhouse door and increasingly negotiable beyond it.
Tajikistan has the region’s widest divide between government and population. The country entered independence through a civil war, from 1992 to 1997, that killed tens of thousands and pitted the secular government against an Islamist-led opposition. It remains the poorest of the former Soviet republics, with remittances from migrant workers, most of them in Russia, worth nearly half of GDP. Religiosity was rising well before the state’s harshest measures: in Pew’s 2011–2012 survey, half of Tajik Muslims called religion very important in their lives, and 27 percent favored sharia as state law. Extremist influence reaches the country from several directions. Tehran received the exiled leader of the banned Islamic Renaissance Party as a guest of honor in 2015, militant networks operate across the Afghan border, and more than 1,300 Tajiks went to fight for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Among them was Gulmurod Khalimov, commander of Tajikistan’s own special police, who defected in 2015 and became the group’s minister of war. Most of the recruits were radicalized as migrant workers in Russia, and all four gunmen charged in the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack near Moscow were Tajik citizens.
A government with few resources has answered with force. It barred the hijab from schools in 2007 and from public institutions in 2009, banned the Islamic Renaissance Party in 2015, has closed more than 1,500 mosques since 2011, and in 2024 outlawed “alien” clothing in public, with fines of about $730 for private citizens, more than four months’ average wages, and up to $5,000 for officials, clerics and businesses. Women have been turned away from hospitals over their headscarves and men forced to shave, even as officials deny that any ban exists. The measures have pushed religiosity out of public view without closing the gap between a narrow secular elite and an increasingly devout society.
Turkmenistan has removed the question from society altogether. It needs no hijab law because it prescribes women’s appearance directly through unpublished presidential “recommendations”: national dress for teachers, students and civil servants and, since 2025, yellow headscarves and dresses for women working in Ashgabat. Turkmen women are effectively required to cover their hair, provided the headscarf is the state’s. Kyrgyzstan sits at the opposite pole. It is the only state in the region that allows the hijab in the classroom, and it has the densest network of Islamic schools and, in Pew’s data, the strongest support for sharia as state law, at 35 percent. Even Bishkek banned the face veil in 2025, citing the mufti’s ruling that it was a foreign trend. Its tolerance in the classroom reflects a weaker state and a more religious society, and the face-veil ban shows how quickly that tolerance narrows once the government decides a practice is foreign.
Two anchors
Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan stand apart because their secularism rests on consent as well as force. Both have written it into law, Baku by statute and Astana in its constitution, and both route disputes through courts and ministries and publish the rules they enforce. Both keep the restriction at the schoolhouse door and leave religious life beyond it free. Both govern publics that largely share the premise: in Pew’s survey, they recorded the region’s lowest support for sharia as state law, at 8 and 10 percent.
Each has a vulnerability. Azerbaijan’s lies in enforcement, where a security-first approach risks handing Iran-aligned networks the grievance they cultivated after 2010. Kazakhstan’s lies within its elite, where a muftiate willing to contradict a minister in public, and former presidential advisers willing to side with it, suggest the consensus is thinner at the top than the constitution implies.
The regional powers will test both. Iran’s interest in Azerbaijan’s Shia has only sharpened since this year’s war. Turkey’s challenge is subtler and harder to manage, because it comes from an ally. Ankara presents the Organization of Turkic States as a civilizational community, and its religious institutions and pro-government media carry the AKP’s model of public piety into the region. Baku and Astana work closely with Ankara on energy, transport and security, but neither lets a partner dictate its foreign or domestic policy, and Northern Cyprus showed the same resistance in Turkey’s closest dependency. The hijab dispute shows that, for Baku and Astana, alignment with Turkey leaves room for their own answers on religion and the state.
Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University’s Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
