EU Reporter: Secularism as a shield: lessons from Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan

"Every state ultimately learns the same lesson: what an external force cannot seize by force, it will try to obtain through the institutions that citizens trust. In the South Caucasus, those institutions are not parliaments or ministries at all. They are mosques and churches. That is why the question of who controls them is a question of national security, and Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia have answered it in completely different ways. This contrast is instructive for every former Soviet state, Muslim or Christian, that wishes to remain sovereign."

This is what Taras Kuzio, professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, writes in his article for EU Reporter.

1news.az presents the article:

A secular choice made twice

Azerbaijan's secularism is not merely a Soviet legacy. In 1918, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic became the first secular democratic republic in the Muslim world and granted women the right to vote earlier than the homelands of two revolutions, the United States and France. Then seven decades of Soviet rule imposed a coercive atheist version of the same idea, which discredited the word for many but also emptied out an independent clerical class. When Azerbaijan restored its independence in 1991, it could have filled that vacuum with imported religious authority, but instead its constitution proclaimed it a secular state in which religion is separated from government.

That choice has paid off. Azerbaijan is a Shia-majority country that is at the same time a partner of Israel, Turkey, and European energy markets, as well as home to a Sunni minority, a historic Jewish community, and Christian communities living without the interfaith violence that has scarred much of the Greater Middle East. As analysts at the European Foundation for Democracy argue, Azerbaijan is tangible proof that secularism does not contradict Islam but rather constitutes a framework in which believers of different faiths and nonbelievers can coexist.

Pressure from the south

Geography makes this something more than an abstract virtue. To the south lies the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose political order rests on clerical authority and claims to leadership in the Shia world, and whose population includes tens of millions of Azerbaijanis. Iran's tools are well known: imams trained in Qom, funding for religious networks, pilgrimage routes through Karbala and Mashhad, and sympathetic media. Eurasianet reported on Baku's concern that Iranian influence over Shia practice grew after the government softened its tacit restrictions on preachers linked to Iran in 2013, with the conservative settlement of Nardaran as a focal point. In 2008, Baku thwarted a plot linked to Iran and Hezbollah targeting the Israeli embassy, and in 2012 it arrested 22 suspects whom, according to the authorities, Iran had trained to attack the U.S. and Israeli embassies. A special operation in Nardaran in 2015 targeted an Islamist group sympathetic to Iran.

Azerbaijan also faces a Sunni flank. Salafi networks linked to donors in the Persian Gulf, militants from the North Caucasus, and later to ISIS encouraged preachers and recruits to travel to Azerbaijan. Baku responded by criminalizing participation in foreign conflicts as a combatant. Only a secular state can demand that religious movements not take orders from, or serve as political puppets of, a foreign government or a foreign ideology.

This is the essence of the defense of secularism in Azerbaijan.

Secularism denies Tehran the right to speak on behalf of Azerbaijan's Shia. It allows the state to register religious organizations and to refuse those that preach discrimination or violence. It keeps the clergy out of politics. Finally, it prevents religious identity from becoming the main axis of loyalty that a hostile neighboring state would like to exploit.

The test from Ankara

The newest test of Baku's model came not from Tehran but from its closest ally. As Paul Goble writes for the Jamestown Foundation, on September 21 Azerbaijan banned female students from wearing the hijab in state schools, and on October 6 extended the restriction to teachers as well. Officials avoided blaming a threat from Iran, but the move was widely seen as an attempt to prevent schools from becoming breeding grounds for Iranian-backed radicalism.

Students, parents, and activists protested, and some of them were arrested. Goble argues that this ban exposed the limits of the "one nation, two states" formula, since Turkey no longer shares Baku's secular model. Protesters in Istanbul chanted that "such a state cannot be our brother," while Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev countered that Turkey has no right to tell Azerbaijan how to live.

Ragip Soylu of Middle East Eye reports that the dispute escalated into unprecedented attacks on Ankara by Azerbaijani media just two weeks after Turkey signed $500 million worth of defense contracts in Baku. It began when President Aliyev rebuked Ankara over Erdogan's criticism at the UN regarding barriers to education for Muslim girls, and deepened when presidential adviser Oktay Saral and AKP (Justice and Development Party) deputy chair Leyla Sahin Usta called on Baku to lift the ban. Baku reportedly demanded Saral's dismissal, while media accused Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan of stirring up unrest, and Turkey's ruling AKP of exporting Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood ideology through NGOs and TIKA (the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency).

Turkey may be unable to feel the full acuteness of these issues because of the threat posed by Iranian extremism. Baku's secularism is directed against any foreign power seeking to shape Azerbaijan's religious life, even a treaty ally such as Turkey.

Orthodoxy and the Kremlin

Now consider the Christian side of the South Caucasus, where the threat is not a revolutionary state like Iran but a patriarchate. The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill has become a bulwark of the Kremlin's "Russian World" ideology and blesses Russia's war against Ukraine as a "holy war."

Ukraine has taken steps to restrict the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church on the grounds that it collaborated with the Russian aggressor. Georgia and Armenia have not yet drawn comparable conclusions, and their churches continue to remain pro-Russian.

Georgia

The Georgian Orthodox Church is the most trusted institution in the country, and for nearly half a century it was personified by Patriarch Ilia II. He studied at the Moscow Theological Academy, yet in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, he also called for an end to the fighting and saw modernization potential in cooperation with the EU.

When he died on March 17, 2026, the situation changed. Just two weeks later, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) issued an unusually blunt direct statement accusing Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople of attempting to destabilize the Georgian Church, which analysts interpreted as the Kremlin staking a claim to the succession. On May 11, Georgia's church council elected Shio Mujiri, who had long been considered close to the ruling Georgian Dream party and to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Patriarch Mujiri is known for his hostile rhetoric toward "liberal ideologemes" and opposed the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Claims that the Kremlin cleared the path for him remain speculative, and the Patriarchate denies them.

Nevertheless, the trend is hard to miss. Georgia, a country that lost a war with Russia in 2008, now has a church hierarchy whose conservative worldview is anti-European and echoes the Kremlin's, as well as a ruling party that has raised the question of proclaiming Orthodoxy the state religion.

Armenia

The Armenian Apostolic Church preserved Armenian identity for centuries without a state of its own, but its hierarchy is not insulated from Moscow. Poland's Centre for Eastern Studies notes that the brother of Catholicos Karekin II, Archbishop Ezras, heads a church diocese covering most of Russia, Belarus, Moldova, and Central Asia.

In 2024, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan led pro-Russian protests demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. In June 2025, days after the arrest of Russian-Armenian oligarch Samvel Karapetyan for publicly supporting the Church and calling for political change, Galstanyan and Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan were detained on suspicion of plotting to seize power. The Church, Karapetyan, and the opposition reject the charges, calling them political persecution.

Whatever the courts decide, the election results speak for themselves. In June 2026, Pashinyan's Civil Contract party won about 49.7% of the vote and took 64 seats, but Karapetyan's pro-Russian Strong Armenia party came in second with 29%. A bloc built around a Russia-linked oligarch who championed the Church's interests now holds nearly a third of the seats in Armenia's parliament. The Kremlin's influence in Yerevan is exercised through oligarchs and the pro-Russian Armenian Church.

One vulnerability, two patrons

Iran's lever is doctrine; Russia's lever is hierarchy and community. The mechanisms differ, but the vulnerability is the same: a religious institution with transnational ties, deep social authority, and little distance from the networks of a foreign patron. Azerbaijan narrowed that gap by insisting that religion be subject to national laws and accountable to no external forces. Georgia, whose church has enjoyed privileged status under a 2002 agreement with the state, and Armenia, where the church is woven into national identity, have left the door ajar to Kremlin influence. A church that its own society cannot criticize, regulate, or question is an attractive asset for a foreign intelligence service, in this case the Russian one. A mosque is no different, in this case the Iranian one.

National sovereignty is indivisible. A state that allows a foreign capital to shape the appointments, finances, and political messaging of its dominant religious institution has outsourced part of its foreign and security policy.

What next?

Western policymakers would be wise to support Azerbaijan's secular model and to press Georgia and Armenia for transparency regarding foreign ties and the financing of church networks. For these three societies themselves, the lesson is that independence is not secured by borders alone. Where a foreign power can reach the church or the mosque, it can also reach the citizens.

Secularism in Azerbaijan is not hostile to religion or to Islam. It is a statement about who holds sovereignty. Baku understood this early, as did Ukraine, while Tbilisi and Yerevan are learning it late and at the cost of their national sovereignty.