There is something profoundly vile about discriminating against women and policing their bodies in the name of secularism. Dictating what a woman should or should not wear is fundamentally at odds with freedom of choice. When institutions use their authority to compel women to dress according to a particular vision of society, secularism begins to resemble the very authoritarianism it claims to oppose.

The question has never been whether women should wear the hijab. The question is why everyone seems to believe they have a say in the matter.

As I write this, in October 2026, Azerbaijan is witnessing protests following new school clothing restrictions that have resulted in hijabi students and teachers being denied entry to some schools. The government’s amendment, approved in September, prohibits clothing deemed inconsistent with the principle of secularism, indirectly restricting the wearing of the Muslim headscarf. Women are now being forced to choose between their religious beliefs and their access to education or employment.

But what kind of freedom requires a woman to abandon part of her religious identity before she can enter a classroom? What does secularism achieve when its application excludes the very people it claims to liberate?

But what kind of freedom requires a woman to abandon part of her religious identity before she can enter a classroom? What does secularism achieve when its application excludes the very people it claims to liberate?

The language of secularism often obscures the power relations at work. Rather than allowing religion to remain a matter of personal conviction, the state assumes the authority to determine which expressions of religion are acceptable in public. The woman’s body becomes the site on which the state performs its commitment to a particular national identity. Her clothing is no longer simply clothing. It becomes a political problem to be managed, regulated and, ultimately, removed from the public sphere.

This is not to suggest that secularism necessarily requires such restrictions. A secular state can protect the right to practice a religion while refusing to impose religious doctrine on its population. The contradiction emerges when secularism is interpreted as a mandate to make religious women less visibly religious. And Azerbaijan is hardly the only place where women’s clothing has become a battleground.

The freedom to wear the hijab, and the freedom not to

If the justification for banning the hijab is women’s liberation, what are we to make of Iran, where women have faced state enforcement of compulsory veiling? How can a politics that claims to liberate women through unveiling coexist with a politics that claims to protect them through veiling, while both deny women the authority to decide for themselves?

These systems are not identical, and their histories, institutions and methods of enforcement differ. Yet what they share is a troubling premise that women’s bodies are legitimate objects of state intervention, and that women cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about how they appear in public.

A woman who chooses to wear the hijab is not necessarily oppressed. A woman who chooses not to wear it is not necessarily liberated. Clothing alone cannot tell us whether a woman is acting under coercion, religious conviction, personal preference, cultural attachment or some combination of these.

A woman who chooses to wear the hijab is not necessarily oppressed. A woman who chooses not to wear it is not necessarily liberated. Clothing alone cannot tell us whether a woman is acting under coercion, religious conviction, personal preference, cultural attachment or some combination of these.

The insistence that it can tell us more about the observer than the woman herself.

Freedom of choice........

© Middle East Monitor