PSCRP-BESA Reports No 247 (November 3, 2026)
by Alexander Shpunt
On July 22, 2026, President Ilham Aliyev enacted amendments strengthening the secular principle in education and instructed the Cabinet of Ministers to bring school uniform regulations into line with the new law. On September 21, the Cabinet adopted Resolution No. 309, signed by Prime Minister Ali Asadov. The document does not mention the hijab but prohibits clothing elements that violate uniform standardization and contradict the principle of secularism in general education. On October 6, the requirements were extended to teachers. Starting October 9, inspections began in schools, and from October 12 onward, girls and women wearing hijabs were massively denied entry to classes across the country.
Protests began in Baku and the southern districts. Outside School No. 69 in the Balakhani settlement, protesters held a placard reading “The hijab is not an obstacle to education,” and students declared a boycott of classes in solidarity with their female classmates. Similar actions were recorded outside School No. 322 in Baku, School No. 9 in Jalilabad, in the village of Mollaoba in the Masally district, and in Khokhmeli, where parents threatened to withhold their sons from school as well. At School No. 90, named after Richard Sorge, in Baku, a teacher wearing a hijab was reportedly dismissed, with students reported to have embraced her in tears. Gulshan Alieva, an English teacher with 23 years of experience, was stopped at the doors of her school in Baku because of her headscarf.
In mid-October, the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported the detention of 37 people in Baku for disturbing public order and clashing with school staff, while activists cited more than 200 detentions. On the same day, reports emerged of the arson of a school principal’s car in the Garadagh district and of four cars in Masazir, as well as an attempted arson at a school in Yasamal. Users reported that TikTok and Instagram were inaccessible, with access preserved only via VPN. On October 16, Amnesty International demanded the lifting of the restrictions and the release of those who had protested peacefully. Imprisoned journalist Polad Aslanov declared a hunger strike, calling the new rules a violation of constitutional rights.
The conflict immediately spilled beyond Azerbaijan’s borders. On October 13, Turkish presidential advisor Oktay Saral called the policy unacceptable, while Mufit Aydin, a deputy of the ruling Justice and Development Party, called on Baku to end it. On the same day, demonstrations took place outside the Azerbaijani embassy in Ankara and the consulate in Istanbul under the slogan “The hijab is a commandment of Allah, it cannot be banned.” On October 13, the ruling New Azerbaijan Party condemned the criticism, stating that no state has the right to interfere in another’s internal affairs, while President Ilham Aliyev warned against external interference in Azerbaijan’s way of life, without naming Turkey directly. On October 14, the Iranian embassy in Baku rejected as unfounded claims linking the protests to Tehran.
At first glance, what we observe appears to be a situational social conflict, conveniently framed as “secular Azerbaijan versus religious Azerbaijan.” However, this is not merely a simplified view—it is a profoundly mistaken one.
Azerbaijan’s religious policy since 1993 should not be viewed as a confrontation between a secular state and Islam. Its functional logic is more focused and, consequently, more consistent. Under the leadership of Heydar and Ilham Aliyev, the state has systematically contested any form of Islamic infrastructure whose source of legitimacy lies outside national territory—regardless of whether that source is Shiite, Sunni, or Salafi.
Defending ideological and political sovereignty under conditions of intense external pressure is the key to understanding the legal codification of this policy, the creation of a unified national system of education and personnel, and the sequence of administrative and judicial measures applied from 2009 to 2024.
The contrast with the early years of independence is instructive. The absence of functioning state regulation in the early 1990s allowed foreign religious foundations, missionary networks, and educational models to penetrate without oversight. The consolidation under Heydar Aliyev, and its continuation under Ilham Aliyev, represents, in this interpretation, a systematic, consistent, and strategically coherent restoration of sovereign control over the formation of the religious clergy.
The Vacuum of the Early 1990s
The first leadership of independent Azerbaijan inherited a state devoid of instruments for regulating religious life. The Law on Freedom of Religion, adopted during the Soviet period and preserved with minor changes, provided no mechanism for national-level community registration, no procedure for approving clergy, no control over foreign financing, and no domestic system of higher religious education. In this institutional vacuum, external actors became de facto producers of Islamic infrastructure.
The most active player of that period was the Kuwaiti Society for the Revival of Islamic Heritage. The organization began its work in Azerbaijan in 1994 and was banned in 2001 after members of its Pakistani and Afghan branches were accused of ties to al-Qaeda. The Society renovated 62 mosques, primarily in the central (39) and northern (17) regions, as well as in Baku (4), and financed the construction of the Abu Bakr Mosque in Baku, which became the unofficial center of Azerbaijani Salafism in the latter half of the 1990s. Against the backdrop of the current 2,900 Azerbaijani mosques, these figures may appear modest—unless one notes that those 62 mosques were, at the time, the only alternative-free centers of religious life for the entire country.
These facts describe a systemic process, not a series of isolated donations. In the absence of a national theological institute, a national system of certification for Muslim clergy, and a national registry of religious communities and organizations, the religious sphere was shaped by three parallel foreign models: the Iranian hawza model, the Turkish Diyanet model, and the charitable model of the Gulf states.
Azerbaijan’s first post-independence governments, preoccupied with military defeat in Karabakh, internal fragmentation, and economic collapse, created no legal alternative and articulated no doctrine of religious sovereignty. The result was the establishment of competing doctrines and structures of religious authority, each anchored in a religious metropole outside Azerbaijan, each possessing its own personnel, financing, and educational curriculum.
Our assessment of this period, therefore, is not a matter of political preference. It is a description of the condition of a state that allowed a center of religious legitimacy to form abroad at the very moment when the state’s own existence was in question.
Restoring Sovereignty Under Heydar Aliyev
The turning point associated with Heydar Aliyev’s coming to power in 1993 is typically analyzed in the context of political stabilization and oil diplomacy. For the purposes of examining the state of religious affairs, its significance lies in the gradual restoration of the state’s role as the sole guarantor of the institutional framework within which Islam could function. The creation of a State Committee, the re-registration of communities, and the subordination of Islamic organizations to a single national center were not administrative formalities. They were instruments for restoring the right to determine who could speak on behalf of Islam in Azerbaijan.
This reform acquired legal form only after ten years of institutional preparation. The first significant step was a package of amendments adopted in July 2009. These introduced two principles that became the foundation of all subsequent legislation. First, the appointment of Islamic clergy could be carried out only through the Caucasus Muslim Board. Second, Islamic rites could be performed only by Azerbaijani citizens who had received religious education within Azerbaijan.
The amendment did not ban Islam, nor did it ban religious education abroad. It banned the automatic conversion of a foreign diploma into national authority to perform religious service. In a state where the majority of Azerbaijani students in the early post-Soviet years resided at the Iranian Qom hawza, this distinction was of decisive importance.
Legal Codification: From Regulation to Criminalization of External Authority
The second stage, which took place in December 2011 and December 2015, completed the codification. Article 21 of the Law on Freedom of Religion was expanded to prohibit the performance of Islamic rites both by citizens educated abroad and by non-citizens. Article 168-1, added to the Criminal Code by the law of December 4, 2015, criminalized the performance of Islamic rites by citizens who had received religious education abroad. The penalty provided for up to one year of imprisonment or a fine of between 2,000 and 5,000 manats, and for religious propaganda by foreigners—one to two years of imprisonment.
The third stage was implemented on June 16, 2021, when President Ilham Aliyev signed amendments to the Law on Religion and the Administrative Code introducing new restrictions, under which the State Committee for Work with Religious Organizations received the exclusive right to approve the appointment of all non-Islamic religious leaders and to participate in the re-certification of all clergy of the State Caucasus Muslim Board every five years. The amendments also provided that, should a clergy position fall vacant, the religious community at that site would cease its religious activity until a new clergyman was appointed.
In 2022, the Rules of Appointment formalized this system. The leadership of the State Committee was empowered to dismiss any Islamic clergyman, including for failing a review (conducted every five years) or for failing twice to appear for appointment interviews. The first known application of these powers, in early May 2022, was the dismissal of Imam Mirseymur Aliyev in Neftchala. Experts at the time noted that the regime’s establishment of direct control over Islamic clergy meant that the state was now playing the role of a religious organization. From a sovereignty perspective, in our view, this assessment is mistaken. The state did not assume a theological function. It assumed a personnel function—namely, the right to verify that a person leading prayer in a public mosque holds authority within the national religious system and is accountable to a national religious institution.
The scale of the subsequent personnel reshuffling demonstrates that this was no symbolic measure. On April 6, 2023, the head of the State Committee, Mubariz Gurbanli, stated that Tehran had attempted to plant Iranian agents in Azerbaijan’s mosques, and that during the first eleven months of the new powers’ operation, the Committee had removed 118 Muslim clergymen from their positions. On June 21, Deputy Chairman Gündüz Ismailov stated that the Committee’s commission had dismissed 181 Muslim clergymen since the new rules took effect in 2022, though he did not specify the reasons for the dismissals. With a total clergy of roughly 900, this represents the turnover of approximately one-fifth of the corps within eighteen months.
In the interpretation adopted here, such a pace should be understood as an emergency corrective response to documented external infiltration, rather than as routine administrative rotation.
Institutional Architecture and Financing
The institutional architecture consists of three nodes which together close off three channels of external influence.
The Caucasus Muslim Board remains the sole religious center for Muslims recognized by the state, and the only body authorized to appoint Muslim clergy. The State Committee for Work with Religious Organizations, established to implement state policy in this sphere, approves appointments, participates in certification, and, since 2022, exercises the right of dismissal. The Azerbaijan Institute of Theology, established by Presidential Decree No. 3654 of February 9, 2018, under the State Committee, provides an alternative education. The Institute was founded on the basis of the Faculty of Theology at Baku State University, which had been formed during the 1992-1993 academic year under an agreement between the Ministry of Education, Baku State University, and Turkey’s Diyanet Foundation, and which had functioned as part of Baku State University until 2017. In 2018, a presidential decree established the Institute to carry out higher religious education and training in accordance with religious traditions, and that same year the educational activities of the Faculty of Theology and the Baku Islamic University were discontinued. The Institute currently enrolls 277 students and employs 43 faculty members. Another official report records 265 undergraduate students, 5 master’s students, and 3 doctoral students, with one faculty and three departments—religious studies, Islamic studies, and languages and social sciences. Annual admission is 60 students across two specializations; education is state-financed, and a graduate who successfully passes an interview with the State Committee receives an appointment and material support from the state.
This constitutes a decisive institutional innovation. The state does not prohibit education in Qom, Cairo, or Riyadh—but it demonstrates that obtaining a diploma there places one at the beginning of a long path toward a position, and that foreign education will more likely hinder than help along that path. Simultaneously, the state creates a domestic, free alternative with guaranteed employment, thereby altering the incentive structure for a young believer wishing to become a clergyman.
Financing confirms the hierarchy of this architecture. The Presidential Reserve Fund allocated 3 million manats to the Caucasus Muslim Board for 2025, and 350,000 manats each to the other major communities: the Baku and Azerbaijan Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Baku Religious Community of Mountain Jews, the Baku Religious Community of European Jews, the Baku Religious Community of Sephardic Jews, and the Apostolic Prefecture of the Catholic Church in Azerbaijan. In the decree for 2026, allocations to the Caucasus Muslim Board were increased to 3.5 million manats (US$2.06 million), while the Orthodox Diocese, the Catholic Prefecture, and the Udi Albanian community each received 400,000 manats (US$235,259), with an additional 400,000 manats allocated to the State Committee for material support of other non-Islamic communities. The total assistance package to religious organizations approved by President Aliyev reached 6.3 million manats, or US$3.7 million. The ratio of 8.75 to 1 between the Muslim center and any other community is not an expression of inequality. It reflects the demographic reality of a Muslim-majority state and the functional burden placed on the Board as the sole national Islamic institution.
The quantitative picture for 2025 corresponds to this structure. There are 994 registered religious communities in Azerbaijan, of which 956 are Islamic, with the remainder Christian, Jewish, Bahá’í, and Krishnaite. There are currently 2,387 mosques, 16 churches, 23 houses of prayer, 7 synagogues, one Bahá’í temple, and one Krishnaite place of worship. Another official statement cites the same figures for 2025: 994 communities, 956 Islamic, 2,387 mosques, 16 churches, 23 houses of prayer, 7 synagogues, 1 Bahá’í and 1 Krishnaite place of worship. Registration within this system is not a neutral procedure. It is a filter ensuring that no community can function without entering the national institutional system.
The Iranian Channel: Education, Party, and Security
The Iranian channel operated through three distinct mechanisms: education in Qom, political organization through the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan, and covert recruitment.
The educational mechanism is illustrated by the case of Sardar Babayev. Born on March 12, 1974, he graduated in 2000 from the theological faculty of Al-Mustafa University in Qom, and, at the invitation of the state-controlled Caucasus Muslim Board, had conducted Friday prayers at the Juma Mosque in Masally since 2009. He was specifically charged with conducting Friday prayers on November 4, November 18, and December 9, 2016, after the adoption of Article 168-1. In 2017, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for conducting prayers after receiving Islamic education outside Azerbaijan. On October 21, 2021, he was charged with treason and arrested, and on September 28, 2023, a Baku court sentenced the Iranian-educated Shiite imam Sardar Babayev to 17 years’ imprisonment for treason. The escalation of his sentence from three years for unlawful activity to seventeen years for treason indicates that, after 2021, the state ceased treating foreign-trained clergy as an administrative problem and began treating them as a security problem.
The party mechanism had been closed earlier. The Islamic Party of Azerbaijan was deregistered in 1995. Its chairman, Movsum Samadov—one of the organizers of the protests against the hijab ban—was detained in January 2011 and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for allegedly preparing a coup d’état and other crimes. In October 2011, the leader of the pro-Iranian Islamic Party of Azerbaijan, Movsum Samadov, and several of his associates were sentenced to 10-12 years’ imprisonment for attempting to overthrow the government through terrorist methods.
The covert recruitment mechanism had been demonstrated even earlier. On March 14, 2012, the Ministry of National Security arrested 22 Azerbaijani citizens on charges of preparing terrorist attacks against the US and Israeli embassies, and on October 9, 2012, the Court on Grave Crimes sentenced a large group of Azerbaijani citizens to 10-15 years’ imprisonment for cooperation with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The suspects had been recruited beginning in 1999 and trained in weapons use and espionage methods at military camps in Iran, enabling them to gather information on foreign embassies, organizations, and companies in Azerbaijan and to organize attacks.
Iran’s institutional presence was also shut down. On October 5, 2021, the office of Ali Akbar Ojaknejad, representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Huseiniyya mosque were closed in Baku, with the Ministry of Internal Affairs citing a sharp rise in coronavirus cases as justification. Ojaknejad had held this post since 1996. The closure, formally justified on epidemiological grounds, occurred against the backdrop of the crisis on the Goris-Kapan road and the beginning of a systematic campaign to remove the last institutional representation of the Iranian religious hierarchy from Azerbaijani territory.
The Turkish and Middle Eastern Channels of Expansion: Not Destruction, But the Assertion of Control by Azerbaijani Authority
The Turkish and Middle Eastern channels were not criminalized to the same degree as the Iranian one, because the form of their influence was different. They did not seek to establish a political party or an underground network. They sought to establish a parallel system of education and infrastructure.
The Turkish model was institutionalized through Diyanet. The protocol between Turkey and Azerbaijan provides that Turkish religious figures, including educators, clergy, and instructors, may work in Azerbaijan only with the consent of the State Committee, and that Turkish clergy may preach only in mosques built by the Turkish Diyanet Foundation in Azerbaijan, namely in Shehidler, Garachukhur, Mehdiabad, and Ilahiyat. This protocol transformed Turkish religious diplomacy from an autonomous presence into a presence contingent upon national authorization. The transfer of the Faculty of Theology from Baku State University to the Azerbaijan Institute of Theology in 2018 completed this transformation. The Turkish foundation could no longer train personnel independently. It could cooperate, but only within the framework of a national institute subordinate to the State Committee.
The Gulf states’ model was closed down through administrative prohibition rather than protocol. The Society for the Revival of Islamic Heritage, as noted above, renovated 62 mosques and built the Abu Bakr Mosque. After its ban in 2001, Azerbaijani authorities annulled the registration of the local branch, an Islamic non-governmental organization suspected of supporting terrorist groups, and the Abu Bakr Mosque was closed in 2008. The closure of the Haji Javad Mosque in Baku on July 1, 2017, to make way for the construction of a new road—after worshippers surrounded the mosque on April 12 to prevent its demolition—illustrates another dimension of the same policy. The mosque was demolished despite a presidentially ordered suspension of the works, and a new Haji Javad Mosque was opened on April 12, 2018, in the presence of the President, approximately four kilometers from the old site. The state did not deny the need for the mosque. It asserted its right to determine its location and personnel.
Nardaran and the Hijab: The Formation of a Precedent
Two incidents, occurring between 2010 and 2015, established a precedent for the use of force in defense of sovereignty.
On November 26, 2015, law enforcement conducted an operation in the village of Nardaran near Baku, whose population is predominantly devout. According to eyewitnesses, men in black masks stormed the home of Hajji Taleh Bagirzade, chairman of the Movement for Muslim Unity, during prayer. Two police officers and four local residents were killed, and more than 60 people were arrested. An official Ministry of Internal Affairs report states that 14 people, including Bagirzade, were arrested on extremism charges, and that the initial raid resulted in the deaths of five suspected extremists and two police officers. The operation led to the forced closure of four Shiite mosques in Nardaran. For the state, Nardaran became proof that a religious settlement could turn into a zone of non-state power. For subsequent policy, it served as justification for formalizing the authorities’ power to appoint and dismiss clergy.
The hijab question provides a second, longer-running precedent. Beginning with the 2010-2011 academic year, schools began refusing admission to girls wearing the hijab, and three months later, Minister of Education Misir Mardanov formally announced the ban, citing school uniform regulations. On December 10, 2010, police dispersed a protest of hundreds of people outside the ministry building, and on May 6, 2011, a rally against the ban was likewise broken up.
The issue resurfaced in 2023. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 37 people were detained in Baku on October 12, 2023, for disturbing public order following clashes at schools over uniform requirements. Amnesty International reported on October 16 that, under new school uniform rules, students and teachers wearing hijabs had been barred from entering schools across Azerbaijan since October 12, triggering mass protests, and that on that day the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported 37 detentions in Baku alone, while activists cited more than 200 detentions.
The continuity between 2010 and 2023 shows that the state views the school as a space of secular society that cannot be subordinated to a religious dress code imposed by foreign doctrine. In this interpretation, the hijab ban is not a measure against Islam as a faith. It is a measure against the promotion of a foreign model of public religious manifestation.
The Escalation of Events in 2023: Three Events in Sixty Days
The period from January to April 2023 should be analyzed as a single sequence of crises, rather than as three separate incidents.
On January 27, 2023, at 08:30 Baku time, the Azerbaijani embassy in Tehran was the target of a terrorist attack when Iranian national Yasin Huseynzade, armed with a Kalashnikov rifle, broke through a security checkpoint and killed the head of the embassy’s security service, Orkhan Asgarov. Security officers Vasif Tagiyev and Mahir Imanov were wounded while preventing the attack. On January 29, 2023, all embassy staff and their family members were evacuated to Baku. In total, 53 people returned home safely. The embassy resumed operations on July 15, 2024, at a new location in Tehran following diplomatic negotiations between Azerbaijan and Iran. The death sentence handed down on January 28, 2024, against Yasin Huseynzade was carried out on May 21, 2025, at 5 a.m. The execution was witnessed by two embassy staff members and a lawyer appointed by the Azerbaijani side.
On January 30, 2023, Pashazade declared in an interview with Report: “We brought a martyr from Iran whom we considered a brother. Now we know they are not our brothers; they are brothers of Armenia.” He emphasized that approximately 40 million Azerbaijanis live in Iran. As early as January 20, Pashazade had expressed negative views regarding Tehran’s sister-city ties with Yerevan, stating that Iran was committing a grave error in the history of Islam, one that was unforgivable. In this sequence, the head of the state religious institution acts as a diplomatic actor, transforming a security incident into a theological and national narrative.
On March 28, 2023, at 21:51, unknown assailants opened fire on Azerbaijani parliamentarian Fazil Mustafa near his home. The deputy survived. An investigation is underway under Article 277, concerning an attempt on the life of a state official. The attack was carried out using a Kalashnikov rifle in front of his home in the city of Baku, Sabunchu district, Zabrat-1 settlement, Babek Street, house 2 Z. Fazil Mustafa sustained wounds to his right shoulder girdle and the lower third of his right thigh. Four suspects in the attack on Deputy Fazil Mustafa were identified and detained, and six more individuals were detained later in connection with the attack.
On April 5, 2023, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the State Security Service, and the Prosecutor General’s Office issued a joint statement claiming that a group had been formed in Azerbaijan with the aim of establishing a state governed by sharia law, and that Iranian intelligence services had detained a group of individuals with material and religious propaganda. According to the statement, Rufulla Akhundzade and Bakhtiyar Bayramov, residents of Iran cooperating with that country’s intelligence services, lured a resident of the Tartar district, Arif Jumshudov, instructing him to seize power by organizing armed unrest and to create a resistance group aimed at establishing a sharia-governed state through the forcible alteration of the constitutional order. By early April, the number of religious believers arrested in Baku and the regions had reached approximately 400.
The coincidence of these three events within sixty days allowed the state to justify, in the eyes of the public, the authorities’ right to approve and dismiss clergy as a defensive response to an external threat rather than as an internal religious reform. This logic is consistent with the thesis of this article. The state did not claim to be acting against Islam. It claimed to be acting against the use of Islam as an instrument of foreign intelligence and political subversion.
Everyday Mechanisms and International Assessment
Beyond high-profile cases, the system functions through routine administrative fines. Courts impose fines for organizing unauthorized religious gatherings under Article 515.0.2 of the Administrative Code, concerning violations of legislation governing religious assemblies, processions, and other religious ceremonies, and such fines are regularly imposed on Muslims, Christians, and other groups alike. In June 2025, the Nakhchivan City Court fined three Protestants from Baku and two local residents 1,500 manats each under the same article for holding illegal religious gatherings. In Guba, on October 10, eleven people were convicted in separate hearings under Article 515.0.2, each receiving the minimum fine of 1,500 manats. By 2026, more than 50 cases involving unauthorized religious gatherings had been documented under this article.
The state does not prohibit worship in registered mosques, does not prohibit the existence of 956 Islamic communities, and does not prohibit the observance of Ashura. It prohibits worship outside the registered system, because worship outside that system is, by definition, worship whose infrastructure is not accountable to religious authorities (it is important to note—not secular, but specifically religious authorities) at the national level.
Joint Declarations and the Ritualization of Loyalty
The final element of the system is the formation of collective loyalty through joint declarations and rituals.
On March 30, 2022, the heads of Azerbaijan’s religious confessions issued a joint statement in response to a biased resolution adopted by the European Parliament, signed by Pashazade, the secretary of the Baku and Azerbaijan Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the chairman of the Udi Albanian Christian community. On September 27, Remembrance Day, Azerbaijan’s religious leaders issued a statement affirming that Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Udi Albanians of Azerbaijan, together with Muslims, commemorate the memory of martyrs with care and reverence. From May 1 to 3, 2024, within the framework of the 6th World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue, held under the patronage of President Ilham Aliyev, a plenary session titled “Strengthening Trust Through Interreligious Dialogue” took place in Baku, along with the Shusha Meeting of Religious Leaders, at which the Shusha Declaration of Religious Leaders was adopted.
A blood donation campaign held in honor of Ashura serves as a ritual complement to these declarations. Pashazade, Gurbanli, and Kamal Abdullayev donated blood on the occasion of Ashura, while the Ministry of Health and the Caucasus Muslim Board conducted a donation initiative at 15 mosques. The voluntary blood donation campaign held throughout Azerbaijan in honor of Ashura concluded with the participation of 2,821 voluntary donors and the collection of 1,269.45 liters of blood. The previous year, when 5,340 donors gave 2,403 liters of blood, this figure was nearly double. Pashazade also warned that certain foreign-funded groups were attempting to stage a provocation on the day of Ashura by exploiting Sunni-Shiite themes, and that those seeking to carry out such a provocation sought to use religion for their own purposes.
In this understanding, the campaign is not a humanitarian gesture. It is a state ritual that substitutes a potentially transnational religious act with a national humanitarian act—one organized by the state and legitimized by the state religious institution.
Conclusion
The Azerbaijani model is not an anomaly. It is a variant of a broader post-Soviet pattern in which a secular state seeks to prevent religious affiliation from becoming a channel for the exercise of foreign sovereignty—a phenomenon we have previously examined in the case of Russian Buddhism and in other publications. The specificity of Azerbaijan lies in the density of external pressure it has faced, the presence of a Shiite majority within a secular state, its proximity to Iran, and the simultaneous presence of three competing external Islamic models.
Under such conditions, the defense of ideological sovereignty cannot be achieved through neutrality. It can be achieved only through the creation of a state-funded national religious field, staffed by nationally educated clergy, and protected by law from any alternative sources of legitimacy.