Prohibiting the education of girls wearing hijab in a country with 98% Muslims

In the Republic of Azerbaijan, with a population of nearly 98% Muslims, protests against the rules of covering schools and prohibiting the education of girls with hijab have increased; Hijab students say that hijab should not hinder their education.

According to Heshmehri Online, female students in the Republic of Azerbaijan stood up and chanted an important slogan: "Hijab should not hinder girls' education."

It may be strange for you that in a Muslim country like the Republic of Azerbaijan, female students express such slogans and protests, but the videos that have gone viral in the cyberspace show the gathering of Muslim female students and hijabs in front of the school principals and arguing with them. The images that clearly show that these female students were prevented from entering the classroom and were deprived of education because of the hijab.

The new regulations include teachers and other school staff. In some viral videos, students hugged their teacher's child with tears in their eyes because their hijab teacher can no longer work in the school.

The protests started in Baku and are spreading to other places and have involved dozens of schools. In some reports, the authorities of some schools did not explicitly give two more choices to veiled students and teachers: to abandon the veil or to leave the school.

These stories also stem from the new reform laws that aim to ensure the compatibility of uniforms in Madras with "secular educational principles". For this reason, although the prohibition of the hijab is not explicitly stated in these regulations, any type of covering that is deemed incompatible with secular principles will be prohibited.

In the latest statement (October 9-December 17) of the Baku Education Department, without mentioning the complaints about preventing veiled students from entering the classrooms, leaving the monitoring of compliance with the regulations to the responsibility of the school administrators, it was only emphasized that possible issues in this field should be raised and resolved in the educational councils of the schools.

In the continuation of the protests, a jailed journalist named Polad Aslanov, announcing that the new laws have affected his child's education, announced his hunger strike in protest against the new regulations.

On the other hand, Jeyhun Valehoglu Mamedov, Member of Parliament, Member of the Science and Education Commission and a member of the ruling "New Azerbaijan" party, in defense of the new regulations, declared their goal to completely eliminate religious, ethnic and socio-economic differences in educational institutions, while nearly 98% of the population of his country are Muslims!

Also, Netanyahu's visit to a "Chabad" school during his 2016 visit to the Republic of Azerbaijan, a special school for the Jewish community of Baku, questions Valeoglu Mamedov's claim in the context of the government's policy to unify all educational institutions away from religious and ethnic differences.