Hijab as a pretext, caliphate as the goal: what lies behind the campaign against Baku

Political pharisaism knows no bounds, but sometimes it reaches the limits of absolute absurdity.

In recent weeks, a farce has unfolded in Turkey that claims the role of a fundamental ideological crusade, but in reality is a sideshow and a provocation inflated to a massive scale. The hysteria whipped up in certain Turkish circles around the topic of the "hijab ban" in Azerbaijani schools continues to strip away masks and reveal who is who in the Turkish political field. What only yesterday they tried to present as "concern for the rights of believing sisters" has spectacularly spilled over into almost extremist and wild calls to dismantle the secular constitutional order of Azerbaijan.

When a street orator in Ankara picks up a microphone and, in all seriousness, announces to a sovereign state that it must submit to certain rules of the "Righteous Caliphate," it becomes both laughable and disgusting at the same time. Laughable — because of the clinical detachment of these figures from reality. Disgusting — because of the undisguised audacity with which outside clerical radicals are trying to barge into our secular home with their own rulebook.

The evolution of a provocation: from "Zionism" to medieval utopias

If one traces the logic of this informational infection, it becomes obvious: the school uniform is merely yet another, extremely clumsily constructed pretext. The organizers of this black campaign are already getting confused in their own talking points, changing ideological banners on the fly.

At first they tried to destabilize Azerbaijani society through the foreign policy agenda. Baku was branded for its pragmatic course, its partnership with Israel and its independent foreign policy. And no sooner had all this noise died down than they found a new "convenient" pretext for attacks on Azerbaijan. A pretext provided by the introduction of a unified school uniform.

Translating a banal normative legal act on a single standard of school clothing into the realm of a "war on Islam" is a frankly destructive technique. In the document of the Ministry of Science and Education of Azerbaijan there is not a word about banning attributes of faith as such. It is about the basic fundamental principle of any modern secular state: a general education school is a space of science, equality and discipline, not an arena for demonstrating religious or social affiliation. The unification of clothing prevents property-based stratification among children and protects them from ideological pressure. But when the sponsors of a picket need a pretext for hysteria, a normal legal standard is brazenly declared "oppression."

And now the masks have been thrown off completely. Pickets at Azerbaijan's diplomatic missions, first in Istanbul and then right in the capital, in front of the embassy in Ankara, have shown the true lining of this movement. Preachers from platforms such as "Köklü Değişim" no longer came out for "headscarves." They came out with direct demands to liquidate Azerbaijani statehood as such, to replace the Constitution with religious dogmas and to integrate our people into their imaginary clerical project.

The import of obscurantism under the guise of "solidarity"

The paradox of the situation is that people incapable of putting their own ideological mess in order undertake to dictate rules to a country that, as far back as a century ago, was the first in the East to create a secular democratic republic.

The Azerbaijani people made their historical and civilizational choice long ago. We have built a solid, independent, secular state where respect for religion is an organic part of the culture, not an instrument of political coercion. In our country, mosques, churches and synagogues stand on the same street, and citizens themselves determine the measure of their faith and their way of life. We do not need uninvited political commissars from Turkish back alleys trying to measure the level of our piety with the ruler of their medieval fanaticism.

The calls heard yesterday at the walls of our embassy by the theologian and writer Abdullah İmamoğlu and other street tribunes like him to subordinate Azerbaijan to the laws of the caliphate are not merely delusional fantasies.

This is a direct, qualified attack on the sovereignty and constitutional order of our country. To come out to the embassy of an independent state and declare that its government, borders and laws must be abolished in favor of a fictitious theocratic center is an encroachment on statehood, which in any normal legal system is qualified as a grave crime.

Viral information clips on social networks, edited footage from a decade ago, the artificial tears of preachers and fake petitions — all of this has been put on a conveyor belt. This is a targeted special operation, whose task is to implant in Turkish society the image of Azerbaijan as an "enemy of religion," to impose on its own citizens a sense of moral superiority and to create leverage for pressure on Baku.

A systemic order and the limits of the permissible

One cannot fail to notice that these actions are coordinated and systemic in nature. The transfer of radicalized pickets from the consulate in Istanbul to the doors of the embassy in Ankara shows that it is not enough for the organizers merely to create media noise — they are deliberately raising the degree of provocation, testing the nerves of the Azerbaijani state for strength. The religious feelings of every person are inviolable — this is a personal choice protected by law, but when religion is turned into a cudgel for political blackmail and attempts are made under this guise to destroy the fundamental foundations of the Azerbaijani nation, all tolerance comes to an end.

Those who are shouting today at the walls of our embassy in Ankara must learn once and for all that Azerbaijan has never been and will never be a testing ground for other people's ideological experiments. We did not allow the Iranian ayatollahs to build their agent networks here, and all the more so we will not allow Ankara or Istanbul marginals to tell us how to educate our children. It is precisely the secular order that serves as the main guarantee of national security, preserving the internal unity of Azerbaijan and ensuring our country's victories, and no one is going to surrender this pledge of a successful future. Any attempts to interfere in Baku's internal affairs and any testing of the authorities' resolve will invariably meet with the harshest and most uncompromising response from the state. Lovers of building caliphates and inventing rules for other peoples should direct their energy to a different address and practice in their own kitchens, since Azerbaijan was, is and will remain a sovereign and SECULAR state, which everyone will have to reckon with.

Farhad Huseyn