An Alliance Without Subordination: What the Hijab Dispute Reveals About Relations Between Baku and Ankara<
Abraham Shmulevich
The current tension between Baku and Ankara over the issue of the hijab in Azerbaijani schools has become more than a dispute over dress or educational regulations. It has clearly exposed the limits of the well-known formula: “one nation, two states.”
That formula still reflects the profound historical, linguistic and cultural affinity between Azerbaijan and Türkiye. Yet it does not alter an obvious fact: under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the two countries have developed on the basis of fundamentally different political and state models. They are united by ethnic kinship, strategic interests and shared historical memory, but they have different views on the role of religion in society, the limits of state intervention and the very logic of national development.









