Islamic radicalism that never was: Islamic discourse as an extension of the elite’s quest for legitimation. Azerbaijan in focus

Abstract

Not unlike the global dynamics and the developments in the rest of Central Eurasia, Islamic discourse in Azerbaijan over the past two decades has not reflected the micro-level shifts in the country’s social-cultural landscape. Rather, it has been formed and evolved as a collateral product of the elite’s tactical pursuit of legitimation across domestic and international planes of power. Grounded in its quest for tactical and strategic survival, the elite’s pursuit of Western (and broader international) recognition, in particular, has stood at the core of the elite’s policies toward Islam and molded the confines of state-promoted Islamic discourse. The regime’s overall strategy has been to continuously reinforce the representation of Islam as an imminent danger to the stability and secular nature of Azerbaijani statehood, while positioning itself—in the eyes of both the “liberal,” “democratic” West and the secularized population at home—as the sole force capable of staving off the Islamic threat. At that, the narrative of Islamic radicalism in Azerbaijan has centered around three principal dynamics: the regime’s anti-hijab policies, the regime’s policies toward the settlement of Nardaran in Baku’s suburbs, and the activities of the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan (IPA). This article provides a closer look at all three to expose the elite’s intention of using these as their primary trigger mechanisms and reference points in the quest for Western—and secular domestic—legitimation and, as such, the pursuit of the negative representation of Islam as a threat to secularity and modern statehood.

Introduction

Not unlike the global dynamics and the developments in the rest of Central Eurasia (Heathershaw & Montgomery, 2016), Islamic discourse in Azerbaijan over the past two decades has not reflected major cultural shifts or changing moods, perceptions, and self-perceptions across the country’s social landscape. Rather, it has been formed and evolved as a collateral product of the elite’s tactical pursuit of legitimation across domestic and international planes of power. Grounded in their quest for tactical and strategic survival, the ruling elite’s pursuit of Western (and broader international) “recognition,” in particular, has stood at the core of the regime’s policies toward Islam and molded the confines of state-promoted Islamic discourse.

Whereas the Azerbaijani elite’s embeddedness in a Soviet milieu and their threat perception of Iran have come together to inform their efforts to gradually ban from public spaces all expressions of Islamic religiosity (Ismayilov, 2018, chapter 1), their pursuit of legitimation from the West and secular segments of the country’s social spectrum, on the contrary, prompted them, inter alia, to encourage some visible expressions of an Islamic presence and allow a degree of freedom to certain Islamic groups and communities—an intentionality that has translated into at least three lines of action: the upholding of Nardaran’s distinction as a staunchly religious place of Shia devouts who are “out of step with mainstream society” (WikiLeaks, 2006) and therefore a danger to modern—Western-inspired—civilization; an ambivalent stance toward the country’s Islamic Party, expressed in the policy of neither banning the party nor registering it; and the launch of occasional provocations around Islamic groups, set to use the latter as points of reference in discussions with Western counterparts and interlocutors, thereby allowing the regime to highlight the reality of the Islamic alternative on the Azerbaijani political landscape. The regime’s overall strategy here has been to maintain a staunchly traditional outlook on the likes of Nardaran and support via official and unofficial channels a number of active, yet controllable, religious groups, “using their images both to intimidate the local secular majority, as well as an international audience with [growing concerns about] Islamization,” thus seeking to “portray itself as the only viable guardian of secular values” (Geybullayeva, 2015).

By continuously reinforcing the representation of Islam as an imminent danger to the stability and secular nature of Azerbaijani statehood and positioning themselves—in the eyes of the “liberal,” “democratic” West and the secularized population at home—as the sole force capable of staving off the Islamic threat, the ruling elite have used the radical Islamist card to justify their increasingly illiberal regime and authoritarian practices. This discursive effort received a particular boost during the dramatic shift in geopolitical conditions associated with the 9/11 events of 2001 in the United States and the “Global War on Terror” that quickly followed. Put differently, following 9/11, the Azerbaijani elite have been inherently interested in prompting Islam in the country to take on a political cloak to be able to publicly paint it as an imminent threat, thus justifying, safeguarding, and extending its own authoritarian existence. The elite’s use and abuse of anti-Islamic discourse and policies has also been part of its strategy to shift domestic attention away from democratization discourse toward ethnic politics and religion, on which there seems to be a nationwide consensus, including across the opposition political landscape. This dimension has grown particularly relevant following the Arab uprisings and increasing popular (and Western) pressure for democratization (or indeed regime change) the latter inspired.

This article provides a closer look at the three principal dynamics associated with the elite-sponsored narrative of Islamic radicalization in Azerbaijan—the government’s anti-hijab policies, the regime’s policies toward the settlement of Nardaran in Baku’s suburbs, and the activities of the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan (IPA)—to expose the elite’s intention of using these as their primary trigger mechanisms and reference points in the pursuit of the negative representation of Islam as a threat to secularity and modern statehood.

Nardaran as a convenient hotbed of “radical” Islam

Nardaran, a small village an hour’s drive from Baku on the Absheron Peninsula long promoted in mainstream discourse as a “stronghold” of “religious fanaticism” and a “hotbed of Iranian influence” (Antelava, 2005; Center for Defense of Political Prisoners, 2017; Fautré, 2016; Geybullayeva, 2016; Mamedov, 2015; Ravich, 2011), has served as the primary reference point in the government’s narrative of Islamic radicalism over the past two decades. While the people in Azerbaijan and foreign experts alike have had time to grow accustomed to news of police clashes with the Nardaran population, it is notable that the first such conflict in the post-independence period took place in June 2002, just a few months after the post–9/11 terrorist turn in the US foreign policy. Among the first states to respond to the US call to join its anti-terrorism coalition following the 11 September attacks in 2001 and among the most active partners in that coalition, ¹ the Azerbaijani regime apparently decided to exploit the newly formed favorable context to its maximum benefit. And raising the specter of radical Islamism inside Azerbaijan to showcase its own role as the only force capable to counteract this threat was singled out as by far the best solution.

In line with this logic, Nardaran’s religious autonomy has been kept intact and reinforced to demonstrate the potency of the elite’s arguments about the real threat Islam and Iranian infiltration stand to pose to the country’s security and the secular nature of its statehood. Consequently, the village has grown to be effectively the only place in the country where the streets had until the recent events of November 2015 displayed religious banners citing the sayings of Imam Hussayn (instead of those of Heydar and Ilham Aliyev), most women wear Iranian-style chadors in public, and pork and alcohol are prohibited (Fautré, 2016; Ravich, 2011).

In parallel, over the course of the country’s independent existence, Nardaran has been exempt from the developmental dynamics characteristic of the rest of the country. In Soviet times, Nardaran had been a thriving marketplace, with a flourishing flower and winter-vegetables industry. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the infrastructure in the area also collapsed and greenhouses shattered, including given the suspension of gas supplies, leaving the town with 90% unemployment (Antelava, 2005; Ravich, 2011). Denied access to some basic amenities, Nardaran has been suffering from chronic gas and electricity shortages, unemployment, and poverty over the past two decades; a measure the regime has allegedly used to allow ground for anti-government sentiments and protests it could subsequently portray as inspired by Islamic radicalism. Consequently, all peaceful protests of the local population of 8,300 against what the residents rightly called inadequate living standards and socioeconomic conditions have been forcefully put down by the authorities under the banner of the fight against international Islamic extremism, including, as noted above, for the first time shortly after the 9/11 events (and the terrorist turn in US foreign policy), in June 2002, when a clash between peaceful protesters and the country’s security forces left one villager (Alihuseyn Aliyev) dead, a few dozen wounded, and more than 40 jailed. The official narrative held that the confrontation was “fomented by Iranian agents” and that “villagers used illegally obtained weapons against security forces” (Hajibeyli, 2002; Khalilova, 2002; also Doyle, 2002; Wilhelmsen, 2009, pp. 729–730), an allegation local residents, as well as many domestic and international human rights defense groups, firmly denied. Indeed, Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the police action during the June 2002 events in Nardaran as “a new low” in the Azerbaijani government’s freedom of expression record (Doyle, 2002), while the head of the Baku-based Institute for Peace and Democracy Leyla Yunus dismissed the claim that protesters were armed, suggesting instead that “[s]tones were [the protesters’] only weapons” and that “[t]he Azerbaijani police shot unarmed people” (Khalilova, 2002).

Prior to the November 2015 military raid, protests in Nardaran also took place in January 2006, when three people died, and in February 2011. Although protest participants—and the Nardaran residents more broadly—have traditionally been painted in the state narrative as “part of what they call a dangerous trend—[the] rise of Islamic radicalism” (Antelava, 2005) and as such are accused with every protest of plotting a coup, spying for Iran, and possession of weapons (Center for Defense of Political Prisoners 2017), these protests were all of a socioeconomic rather than religious nature (Antelava, 2005; Goyushov, 2008, p. 77; Hajibeyli, 2002; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty [RFE/RL], 2011; Ravich, 2011). An independent Azerbaijani analyst and longtime observer of the country’s religious field, Eldar Mamedov, notes, for example, that “the most vocal grievances of locals [have not been] that the Azerbaijani government stifles expressions of faith, including the hijab ban. [Rather, their] worry [has been] more about the lack of decent life prospects” (Mamedov, 2015). Indeed, Mamedov continues, “[p]overty in Nardaran offers a stark contrast” with “Azerbaijan’s gleaming capital with its five-star hotels and fashion shows” and “with the wealth that is flashed by Baku’s elite.” In fact, as Willy Fautré suggests, “Nardaran may be one of the poorest places in Azerbaijan, while it is so close to the richest place in Azerbaijan, Baku” (Fautré, 2016). Gulnara Inanc, an Azerbaijani expert on ethnic and religious matters and director of the online analytical center “Ethnoglobus,” in turn highlights that “[t]hese Bakuvian outskirts [like Nardaran] are essentially apolitical,” while Azerbaijani historian Altay Goyushov rejects the notion that the “Nardaran people are puppets of Iran” (Ravich, 2011).

In response to the government’s latest assault on Nardaran in November 2015 and a televised smear campaign against the religious activists that surrounded it, political analyst and opposition REAL (Republican Alternative) movement board member Azer Gasimli exclaimed,

Yet again, they [the government] are talking about foreign forces, terrorists, extremists seeking to undermine the mythical stability. Yet not even once have they demonstrated any evidence exposing the identity of these external forces. What kind of stability is it that brothers open fire on each other? (Kazimov, 2015)

Independent political analyst Azer Rashidoghlu offered an alternative view, suggesting that the November 2015 police raid on Nardaran might have been the result of an ongoing intra-elite struggle in Azerbaijan, with one group (led by the head of the presidential apparatus Ramiz Mehdiyev) allegedly trying to use the Nardaran affair (including by radicalizing the practicing Shia segment of the population) as a pressure mechanism to end President Ilham Aliyev’s onslaught on the incumbent political elite (which had by that time resulted in the dismissal of National Security Minister Eldar Makhmudov and Information Technologies Minister Ali Abbasov, with the dismissal of Taxes Minister Fazil Mammadov and Speaker of the National Assembly Ogtay Asadov along with his three deputy speakers named as being next on the agenda) (Azadliq Radiosu, 2015). ²

The IPA and the regime’s strategy of survival

The strategy of insinuating the danger of political Islam in pursuit of domestic and international legitimation has also prompted the regime to maintain the country’s Islamic Party (IPA) in a semi-legal status over the past two decades. Established in 1992 by Haji Ali Akram Alizade Nardarani, the IPA, according to some sources, rapidly amassed some 60,000 members and opened offices in 65 towns and cities across the country. The party also published two newspapers: The Voice of Islam and The World of Islam. Following their visit to the Islamic Party’s premises, where the operatives of the US-based non-governmental organization, Democracy Education and Advancement, saw displayed pictures of Imam Khomeini and Iran’s Supreme Leader, and their subsequent investigation into the party’s activities, they allegedly advised President Heydar Aliyev that the party “was a threat to [Azerbaijan’s] national security.” The Azerbaijani regime responded by imposing some limitations on party activities and arresting one of its leaders, Karbali Agha, who died in prison soon thereafter. Following mourning ceremonies for him, held in several towns and cities across the country, the government moved to deregister (and thus effectively outlaw) the party in 1995 and arrested three of its leaders—Haji Ali Akram, his deputy Haji Agha Nouri, and Haji Vagif—in 1996. ³

Although deregistered in 1995 and with its power base effectively limited to Nardaran, the IPA has never been fully banned from the country’s political space and has continued to operate relatively unhindered—a situation that has allowed the regime to achieve both of the objectives of its engagement with the country’s religious realm. The party being kept outside the realm of formal law ensured that its members could not, in their official capacity, participate in the country’s presidential or parliamentary elections (hence, they posed no immediate political challenge to the incumbent and could not openly use Islamic ideals to rally the population toward political ends). But that the party was permitted to continue to function, including as instantiated in occasional public statements and street demonstrations against Western and Israeli policies (often staged around high-profile visits by Western or Israeli officials to Baku) (Abbasov, 2010), allowed the elite to use them as points of reference in discussions with Western counterparts. The visit by senior Iranian cleric Hussein Nuri Hamadani to Azerbaijan in late August–early September 2015 at the invitation of Sheikh Allahshukur Pashazade, and his meeting with a number of religious leaders in the country during the visit (Contact.az, 2015), was likely part of the same strategy and “a message to the West” (Geybullayeva, 2015).

The hijab ban and the rise of political Islam

Save for a brief period in the 2000s, associated with the activities of the imam of the independent Juma mosque community and head of the Center for Protection of Freedom of Conscience and Religion (DEVAMM), Ilgar Ibrahimoghlu (Ismayilov, 2018), the Islamic movement in Azerbaijan was born—and Islam in the country assumed a political cloak—as a response to the government’s move against wearing the Islamic headscarf (the hijab) in public spaces. Taleh Baghirzade and Movsum Samadov—the two most outspoken religious leaders in Azerbaijan and both currently imprisoned—took on a political identity and joined the political realm as a reaction to the government’s anti-hijab policies.

Taleh Baghirzade, a young charismatic scholar of Shia Islam with a religious education from Iran’s Qom (2005–2010) and Iraq’s Najaf (2010–2011), ⁴ cut short his Islamic studies in Iraq to return to Azerbaijan and participate in the May 2011 public protests against the government’s hijab ban. As a result, he was imprisoned for a period of 18 months on charges of “organisation of actions promoting infringement of social order or active participation in such actions” (Abbasov, 2013). ⁵ Baghirzade was imprisoned two more times afterward, each time as a response to his active preaching against the government’s consistent assault on religious practice and gradually against the overall climate of entrenched authoritarianism in the country. ⁶ Every time he came out of prison, Baghirzade would grow ever more vigorous and active in speaking out against what he regarded as the incumbent regime’s suppressive policies toward Islam and for each consecutive imprisonment he would be handed a longer prison term than before. Arrested most recently on 26 November 2015, following a police raid on the settlement of Nardaran where he was staying at a friend’s house, Baghirzade was charged with terrorism, plotting a government coup, illegal possession of firearms, and homicide, and sentenced in late January 2017 to 20 years in prison (HRW, 2017; Runey, 2017).

Likewise, Dr. Movsum Samadov, a Shia scholar with a religious education from Iran’s Qom seminary and the leader of the IPA since 2007, initially shied away from direct criticism of the incumbent regime, instead limiting himself almost exclusively to anti-Western rhetoric and firm denunciations of Azerbaijan’s association with Israel and the latter’s aggressive policies in the Middle East (Caucasian Knot, 2011; Mammadli, 2008; Mammadov, 2011). However, Samadov became increasingly outspoken against the government as a campaign to close mosques across the country gathered momentum from 2009 and particularly following the effective ban on the hijab in public schools since December 2010. Besides issues of a purely religious nature, he gradually began to criticize the overall authoritarian, “corrupt,” and “unjust” nature of the regime (Crescent International, 2011; Isazade, 2010), including in his widely publicized party meeting speech on 2 January 2011, where he drew parallels between incumbent President Ilham Aliyev and various aspects of his policies and Yazīd ibn Mu’āwiya, a tyrant leader of the 7th-century Arab caliphate (680–683) responsible, among other things, for the Karbala massacre and the associated murder of the Prophet Muhammad’s (SAAS) ⁷ grandson, Hussayn ibn Ali. ⁸ In that speech, which served as the final trigger for his arrest a few days later, Samadov went so far as to compare the tendency of Azerbaijan’s ongoing political dynamics with the Stalinist repressions of 1937 and call on the nation to “rise up and put an end to the despotic regime,” allegedly the first time since 1995 that a political leader in Azerbaijan had made such a call (Abbasov, 2011a; 5Pillars, 2014).

Another prominent Shia Islamic scholar with a religious education from Iran’s Qom seminary, founder of the National Moral Values Public Association (established in 2005), and head of the religious organization Cəfəri Heyət (“Team of Jafarits”), Abgul Suleymanov, too, initially focused in the large part on voicing condemnation of Israel’s aggressive policies in the Middle East, but, by the beginning of the mid-2000s, began to vigorously speak up against the closure of mosques and called on believers not to remain silent in the face of this “evil.” He would occasionally organize public protests against individual policy decisions, including in the summer of 2009 against the intended move to demolish the Fatimeyi Zəhra mosque in downtown Baku (an effort that prevented the demolition at the time). Following the government’s hijab ban in 2010, he emerged as one of the leaders of the anti-hijab ban protest, both by raising his voice on the issue in the media and conferences and by playing an active part in organizing the December 2010 and May 2011 public protests against the initiative. Arrested in August 2011 for “possessing weapons and drugs,” he was eventually sentenced, in August 2012, to 11 years in prison on what were widely considered fabricated charges of committing unrest, attempting to breach public order, and inciting the population to disobedience (Crescent International, 2015b; 5Pillars, 2014). ⁹

It is highly unlikely that any of these religious leaders would have ever been known to the wider public or to the Western media, had there been no move on the part of the government against the hijab and, beginning in 2004, against mosques. And, hence, no problem of Islamic radicalism would have ever been associated with the country-name of Azerbaijan, an outcome in which the incumbent regime was apparently not interested.

Indeed, the Baku government’s decision to ban the wearing of religious headscarves in public schools was announced by the then Education Minister Misir Mardanov on 9 December 2010, ¹⁰ which fell on the 9th day of the Islamic month of Muharram, just one day before the Day of Ashura—the day on which Shias traditionally come together in mourning the death in the Iraqi town of Karbala of the Prophet’s (SAAS) ¹¹ grandson Hussayn ibn Ali from the hands of the tyrant ruler of those days, Yazīd-ibn-Mu’āwiya, in 680 CE. Every year, devout Shias in various cities and villages of the country commemorate the day with public marches, chanting religious slogans and the like. Timing the announcement of the hijab ban to this day could be nothing short of provocation, set to invite the Shia devouts to rise up in protest, thus providing the government with absolute, easily demonstrable evidence of the looming threat of Islamic radicalization.

The provocation element of intentionality behind the 2010 move to ban the hijab is all the more apparent, given the elite’s earlier experience with the consequences of such a move: the very first time the authorities tried to introduce a ban on headscarves in public schools was in 2007, when they published a draft law to that effect, but had to back out in the face of strong opposition from within the devout Moslem community. It seems that the authorities’ move to ban the hijab back in 2007 had been driven solely by the desire to wipe Islam off as a public phenomenon, while the ban in December 2010 had a dual intentionality behind it, including the provocation of the devout Moslem community into actively protesting the ban, thus serving as a live expression of Islamic “radicalisation” on the rise. Some experts, including lawyer Intigam Aliyev, have suggested that the hijab ban represents nothing but a governmental “ploy” “created artificially” to stir up religious controversies in the country and “distract people from the country’s serious social and political problems” (Kazimova & Fatullayeva, 2010).

As expected, the December 2010 public announcement of the hijab ban sparked a major protest in downtown Baku the following day, on the sacred Islamic Day of Ashura. Although centered in Baku, the protests were also followed by smaller scale rallies in the village of Nardaran 25 km north of Baku and in southeastern regions, both areas known for their strong Shia following. Two more protests were subsequently held in downtown Baku: on 6 May 2011 and 5 October 2012. On all three occasions, protesters rallied outside the country’s education ministry, were limited in number to a range from several dozen (in May 2011) to several hundred (in December 2010 and October 2012), and as such were easily dispersed by the police (Abbasov, 2011b, 2011c; Kazimova & Fatullayeva, 2010; RFE/RL, 2010, 2012; Sultanova, 2012a). This notwithstanding, the regime has reportedly occasionally used provocateurs to stir up more radical clashes between the devouts and the police, insinuate (violent) resistance to the police, and transform sporadic acts of protest by religious groups into violent demonstrations, these subsequently made public on online platforms such as YouTube. This effort has allegedly been meant to “expose”—to the secular populace at home and the West alike—the violent (and barbarous) nature of “political” Islam in Azerbaijan and the reality of the threat to secular statehood and stability it represents. In reference to the anti-hijab ban protest outside the education ministry in October 2012, for example, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee noted in its May 2015 report on Azerbaijan’s prisoners of conscience:

The action was peaceful and protesters refrained from confronting the police and employees of other law-enforcement agencies.

Suggesting that “[p]rovocateurs were used,” the report continued,

[t]hese provocateurs threw wooden sticks bearing protest slogans and imitated resistance to police. This was done to fuel claims that the action was not peaceful. None of the provocateurs, who are clearly seen in the photos and videos, have been detained. (Corley & Kinahan, 2015)

In reference to another similar demonstration against the hijab ban held in May 2011, one of the leaders of the Azerbaijan Islamic Party claimed in a conversation with journalists in August 2011 that “‘not a single face from Nardaran’ was at the flash protest in Baku on May 6 against the government’s informal ban against wearing [the] hijab” (Ravich, 2011).

Beyond the anti-hijab protests, a former chief of Azerbaijan’s Islamic Party, Haji Mehdi, suggested, in a discussion with US embassy officials in Azerbaijan in 2007, that, as part of its effort to misrepresent Islam as a “fundamentalist problem” in the country, the Baku government continuously sought to escalate tensions between local Nardaran residents and rich outsiders who owned newly built posh villas in the village, making sure to report various expressions of these tensions in the local press (WikiLeaks, 2007b).

In line with this narrative, in response to the public protests against the hijab ban in December 2010, when some 1,000 religious activists blocked the road outside the education ministry for about an hour, exclaiming “hijab is our honor!” and “freedom for hijab!” the then Education Minister Misir Mardanov suggested that the protests were “organised by some groups inside and outside of the country,” apparently hinting at Iran’s role in the process. Azerbaijan’s former ambassador to Tehran, Aliyar Safarli, was more explicit than Mardanov in exposing Iran’s alleged role, contending that

Iran is trying to use Islam to increase its influence in Azerbaijan, and does not miss a single chance to do so. I [am] fully convinced that Iran is stirring up this problem and provoking people into going on protests about the hijab ban. ¹²

The country’s interior minister, Ramil Usubov, was in turn quick to portray the protesters as “religious extremists” and “radicals,” stating that “[i]n the struggle with extremely dangerous and harmful religious extremism and radicalism, all our officers are watchful and vigilant.” Effectively equating head-covering with religious extremism, he added that “[t]hose who want their daughters to cover their heads can do so away from school, at home” (The Telegraph, 2011).

Notably, the regime’s onslaught on the hijab came when Azerbaijan’s relations with the West hit its utmost low after Ilham Aliyev took over the presidency from his diseased father in 2003: both the 2003 presidential elections, which marked the hereditary transfer of power from father to son, and the 2008 presidential elections were met with strong criticism from the West (Nichol, 2008), while the fervor of the color revolutions taking place across the post-Soviet landscape (Beacháin & Polese, 2012) added further to the ruling elite’s threat perception of the West. In view of this, the elite needed something to show their value to the West, and, as noted above, in line with the strategy chosen following the events of 9/11 in the United States, pointing to the rise of political Islam as the alternative to the incumbent regime and insinuating Iran’s efforts to make that happen were apparently chosen as the best policy to pursue.

Insinuating the “war on terror” at home as a means for regime legitimation

Positioning itself as the West’s staunch ally in the “Global War on Terror,” the Azerbaijani political establishment has gradually evolved to claim that Azerbaijan is facing a viable threat of terrorism at home. As part of this narrative, the Azerbaijani elite have been trying to “convince” the West, particularly the United States, that “Iran was seeking to foment unrest in Azerbaijan,” such that Presidential Office Head Ramiz Mehdiyev once presented the US ambassador to Baku with an allegedly intercepted Persian language document featuring “instructions to plant anti-Islamic articles in the Azerbaijani media” as “evidence” of Iranian meddling in, and Tehran’s effort to control, Azerbaijan’s domestic affairs. That the document was presented during “a meeting in which the international community was critici[s]ing Azerbaijan’s deteriorating media environment” suggests that the intention behind Mehdiyev’s move likely was to influence Western opinion and offset otherwise harsh—and ever-growing—criticism of Azerbaijan’s increasingly dire media situation (WikiLeaks, 2007a). As Arif Yunus, an Azerbaijani historian with a number of studies on Islam in Azerbaijan to his credit, has suggested, “[b]y claiming that Azerbaijan faces a terrorism threat, the Azerbaijani government wants to show that it is in a vulnerable situation. The claim of terrorism is a good way for the government to have a dialogue with the West” (quoted in Sultanova, 2012b).

Notably, most leaders of the religious opposition, including the leader of the outlawed IPA, Movsum Samadov, in 2011 and the leader of the unregistered Movement for Moslem Unity (MMU), ¹³ Taleh Baghirzade, in 2015–2016, both now recognized by international human rights organizations as political prisoners, were imprisoned on charges of involvement in the preparation of an act of terror and coup d’état, as well as with wider terrorist networks, Iran’s special security services, or both, to justify state repression against them in the eyes of the West and secular civil society at home.

Ilgar Ibrahimoghlu, imam of Baku’s historic Juma mosque and effectively the first of the country’s clerics to openly associate with and support the secular opposition against the incumbent political regime, had initially been accused, however illogical as this might seem, of connections with both Iranian revolutionaries (representing Shia Islam) and al-Qaeda (acting in the name of Sunni Islam), as well as of preaching “radicalism,” when the authorities decided in late 2003 he was too much of a political obstruction (due in particular to his close association with the secular opposition). He was eventually given, in April 2004, a 5-year suspended jail sentence for “participation in mass disorder” (Corley, 2005; EurasiaNet, 2004; Wilhelmsen, 2009, pp. 730–731). Almost a decade later, the authorities used the same narrative to incarcerate the leader of the outlawed Azerbaijan Islamic Party and another increasingly prominent Shia cleric, Movsum Samadov. Samadov was arrested in January 2011 on charges of group involvement in the illegal possession of weapons, attempting to seize power by force, and preparing an act of terror (on top of the initial charge of resisting the police), with a sentence of 12 years reached in early October 2011. ¹⁴

Still, the regime’s instrumentalization of the narrative of religious extremism proved most dramatic in its efforts to neutralize Taleh Baghirzade and his MMU. Since its establishment in January 2015, particularly after Taleh Baghirzade’s second release from prison in late July that year, the MMU, denied official registration (a reality that rendered running religious sermons or otherwise speaking in the name of religion illegal for its representatives), became subject to the government’s harshest smear campaign yet, waged across all mass media under their control. Among the most common regime-promoted allegations was that the movement was financed by foreign sources (in particular from Iran) and, as such, represented “radical extremism” and was connected to international terrorist networks, including the likes of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and the Taliban. Baghirzade has strenuously denied this accusation, suggesting that if such connections to foreign powers existed, Azerbaijan’s national security ministry should have been in a position to present evidence to that effect a long time ago. ¹⁵ Unable to otherwise silence Taleh Baghirzade, the regime moved to imprison him on 26 November 2015, following what the country’s human rights defenders have insisted was a carefully planned military assault by a special police force on the settlement of Nardaran that he was visiting on the day, an operation that resulted in the death of at least four villagers and two policemen ¹⁶ and the subsequent arrest of 14 people, including Baghirzade himself.

In a joint statement following the raid, Azerbaijan’s interior ministry and prosecutor-general’s office claimed that Baghirzade and his associates created the MMU with the objective of overthrowing the constitutional order and establishing “a religious state under Shari’a law,” an end state which the statement suggested MMU members had in mind when recruiting supporters in Baku and the provincial areas and conducting “illegal meetings” in Nardaran “to discuss mobilising the population in a violent uprising against the authorities.” Consequently, the statement concluded that the police operation in Nardaran and the subsequent arrests were meant to neutralize “an armed criminal group that acted under the cover of religion and was seeking to destabilise the social-political situation and organise mass unrest and acts of terrorism” (Fuller, 2015).

Not only have Taleh Baghirzade and his associates, along with the country’s human rights defenders, firmly denounced the government’s allegations, for which the court subsequently failed to produce any evidence, ¹⁷ but they have also claimed unequivocally that the entire “Nardaran affair” was fabricated by government forces who had “deliberately [sought] to provoke a confrontation in Nardaran to create a pretext for quashing [Taleh Baghirzade and] his movement,” including “in retaliation for the [harsh] criticism voiced by the Movement for Moslem Unity of blatant falsification during the parliamentary elections on November 1” (Azadliq Radiosu, 2016d, 2016e, 2016f; Fuller, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Hasanli, 2016a; Majid, 2015b, 2016a). International human rights watchdogs, including HRW (2017) and Amnesty International (2017), have sided with this interpretation.

Consequently, Azerbaijan’s human rights community in October 2016 designated all 87 people imprisoned on criminal charges in relation to what has come to be known as the “Nardaran affair,” including Taleh Baghirzade and members of his MMU, as political prisoners. ¹⁸ The overall logic behind their inclusion in the list was, as Azerbaijan Without Political Prisoners social alliance coordinator Oktay Gulaliyev later explained it, that

here we had a pre-planned bloody operation in Nardaran perpetrated in an unprofessional way by the government on 26 November 2016 [with] a concrete objective to render innocuous Taleh Baghirzade and his supporters, dispel the Nardaran myth, and subdue that village. Hence, it was a political undertaking from head to toe . . . and because the Nardaran case itself is political, everyone imprisoned in relation to this case is innocent and a political prisoner, be it Taleh Baghirzade . . . or a casual passer-by, or a tea-house worker . . . they are all victims, and because the case itself is political, they are all political prisoners. ¹⁹

In his earlier comment, Gulaliyev suggested that with the “Nardaran affair,” the government sought

to create a loud show around the Movement for Moslem Unity in order to justify repression against religious activists and try to discredit the liberal opposition in the eyes of the West given their collusion with radical Islamists. (Majid, 2016a)

The instrumentalized narrative of religious extremism beyond the religious realm

The government’s resort to claims of extremism has not been limited to their engagement with Islamic movements. A similar narrative has often been used against secular opponents, including in October 2005, when in the run-up to the parliamentary elections later that year the then spokesman for the ruling Yeni Azerbaijan Party (YAP) Husein Pashayev accused Nariman Gasimoghlu, a candidate from the Azadliq (Freedom) opposition bloc, of circulating books among voters which “propagate religious extremism” and thus being in violation of campaign rules—those books were in fact copies of Gasimoghlu’s own translation of the Quran (Aliyeva, 2005). In the context of the dramatic drop in international oil prices and the associated crisis facing the country’s economy in the 2010s, the elite have begun to use similar tactics to legitimate their crackdown on outbreaks of social unrest, including in early 2016, when the government, besides accusing the traditional opposition Popular Front and Musavat parties of “disrupt[ing] political stability in the country,” blamed the countrywide demonstrations (in Siyazan, Neftchala, Lankaran, Guba, Fizuli, Aghsu, and Agjabedi, among other regions) staged on 10 to 13 January 2016 in response to the rising economic crisis and associated price hikes and unemployment on “some radical and religious extremist groups” (Guliyev, 2016; Shiriyev, 2016).

Likewise, a July 2018 murder attempt on the mayor of the country’s second major city, Ganja, Elmar Valiyev, infamous among the public for his brutality and corruption, was quickly linked by the government to “radical Islam” and the perpetrator, 35-year-old Yunis Safarov, was suggested to have received a religious education in Iran’s Qom seminary (thus likely representing Shia Islam), to have fought in support of ISIS in Syria (thus allegedly acting in the name of Wahhabi Islam), and to have been a member of Taleh Baghirzade’s MMU (thus, again, allegedly acting under the banner of Shia Islam), an allegation that MMU representatives dismissed as ridiculous ²⁰ and one that many commentators, including Ilgar Ibrahimoghlu, contended was meant to shift the domestic audience’s attention away from the real causes of the incident and undermine the widely held public support for Yunis Safarov, who was quickly growing into a nationwide hero. ²¹

The government’s attempts to use the narrative of religious extremism against its secular opponents have been particularly noticeable in recent years in relation to the Popular Front party and the National Council of Democratic Forces (NCDF) (“Milli Şura”). These include efforts made to implicate these two groups, primarily their leaders Ali Karimli and Jamil Hasanli, in the purportedly “terrorist” affair in Nardaran and as co-conspirators with Taleh Baghirzade’s MMU and Iran’s special services, in preparation of an “armed coup” that the police raid in Nardaran in November 2015 and the subsequent arrests allegedly prevented; this to discredit the country’s major political opposition in the eyes of both the domestic and international community (read: the West), legitimate the ongoing crackdown and mass arrests of key opposition forces, and, in the best-case scenario, wipe them off the country’s political scene completely. Testifying in court, Taleh Baghirzade stated that he had been “subjected to torture to induce him to incriminate chairman of the [Popular Front party] Ali Karimli and head of the opposition National Council of Democratic Forces Jamil Hasanli,” in exchange for which the authorities promised to lift some charges against him, pressure to which he refused to yield (Fuller, 2016a, 2016b). Their latter attempt having failed, the regime moved on 8 December 2015 to arrest Popular Front deputy chairman Fuad Gahramanli on charges that 10 Facebook status statements that he wrote between 3 September and early December 2015 in support of Taleh Baghirzade, his MMU, and the Nardaran residents sought to “justify the creation by Taleh Baghirov (Baghirzade) of an armed extremist group, the perpetration by it of serious crimes in Nardaran under the guise of religion; called on the villagers to prepare for an open struggle and a violent seizure of power and holding long protests with the aim of a forcible change of the constitutional order”; and provoked religious hatred and mass disorder—the first time the regime arrested anyone explicitly for expressing their political views. In these Facebook posts, Gahramanli also harshly criticized the government, including in relation to police action during the Nardaran events, calling on the Nardaran residents, the political opposition, and the overall population “not to abandon Taleh Baghirzade,” “encourag[ing] them to continue their protests,” as well as “question[ing] the legitimacy of the security operation in Nardaran” and condemning the Nardaran confrontation as a “government-orchestrated scenario.” Ultimately sentenced in January 2017 to 10 years in prison for “inciting the public to disobey the government (sedition), making appeals against the government, and the incitement of national, racial, social, or religious hostility,” Gahramanli was subsequently recognized by both Amnesty International (2016, 2017) and HRW (2017) as a prisoner of conscience, “detained solely for the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression.” ²²

In line with this logic, the government used the post-2013 standoff between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, particularly following the July 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan, to accuse “certain opposition circles,” as the then deputy head of the president’s office (and since 2018, prime minister) Novruz Mammadov referred to them, primarily the Popular Front Party and the National Council, of harboring links to and being financed by Gulen, whose network has been outlawed in Turkey as terrorist since May 2016 (and as such dubbed “the Gulenist Terror Group”) (Butler, 2016). ²³ On 15 August 2016, the prosecutor-general’s office announced it had opened a criminal case against supporters of the Turkish Gulen movement “to prevent illegal actions on the territory of Azerbaijan.” On 18 August 2016, Fuad Ahmadli, youth department head of the Popular Front party’s section in Baku’s Khatai district, was arrested for a 3-month period (subsequently extended pending investigation) on charges of connections with the Gulen network. ²⁴ Two days later, on 20 August 2016, the government moved to arrest Popular Front chair Ali Karimli’s aid and marketing director for Azadliq newspaper, Faig Amirli, for a 3-month period (subsequently extended pending investigation) on charges of collaboration with Fethullah Gulen (the authorities publicly painted Amirli as an Azerbaijan-based imam of the Gulen movement), as well as incitement of ethnic, racial, and religious hatred, and disturbing public order under the guise of promoting religious sects and performing religious rites. ²⁵ The Popular Front Party and other opposition groups denounced the government’s accusations of their association with Fethullah Gulen as “brazen slander” meant as “part of the long-time politics of repression against the party” and efforts to undermine the political opposition in the battle for public opinion. Instead, members of the political opposition suggested that true members of the Gulen network in Azerbaijan were represented in government and government-owned enterprises and as such enjoyed state protection. Writing from prison on 25 August 2016, Taleh Baghirzade addressed Turkish President Erdogan in an open letter, suggesting that the Azerbaijani government was exploiting the 15 July events in Turkey to “destroy and silence its political opponents, opponents continuously criticising the corrupt and authoritarian political regime.” The letter further contended that “the real ‘Gulenists’ in Azerbaijan have put down roots within various branches of government, in television and other media organisations, which defend and promote official political line, [as well as] within large companies and holdings” and that these remain outside state criticism (Baghirzade, 2016). ²⁶

Within a short period and like Ilgar Ibrahimoghlu a decade prior, the Popular Front Party and the National Council were accused by various government groups of simultaneously cooperating with both Sunni (the Gulen network) and Shia (Taleh Baghirzade’s MMU and Iranian special forces) groups—an inconceivable accusation given the Shia-Sunni schism that plagues the Moslem community worldwide.

These have all come and gone amid the government’s regular accusations that the secular opposition is cooperating with the West to the extent of being the latter’s “fifth column” in Azerbaijan (Mehdiyev, 2014), and the rise, in May 2013, of the NCDF, whose initial candidate for the presidential elections in October of that year, Ilgar Ibrahimbayov, held Russian citizenship along with his Azerbaijani passport, which caused both the Council and party members to be labeled a “Russian project” (Balci, 2013; Caucasus Elections Watch, 2013; Contact.az, 2013; Kazimova, 2013; Lomsadze, 2013; Ses Informasiya Agentliyi (SEA), 2013). The public rally that the National Council and the Popular Front Party held on 11 September 2016 under the slogan “No to Monarchy, Stop the Pillage” to protest the constitutional reform that was to be put to popular vote in a referendum later that month is illustrative: various government forces sought to use a number of the aforementioned narratives to downgrade the opposition-run event in the eyes of the broader populace and thus undermine popular support for the opposition. Pro-government member of Parliament (MP) Aydin Mirzazade, for example, associated the rally with Western or Armenian support from abroad (Baghirova, 2016). Another MP, Siyavush Novruzov, suggested a similar narrative at one point, ²⁷ while at another instance dubbing many of the activists who attended the rally as linked to “religious extremist movements” (Azadliq Radiosu, 2016c). A number of media outlets likewise accused the rally organizers of harboring a religious agenda (1News.az, 2016). Furthermore, some opposition activists, including Ali Karimli’s son, claimed that the government had arranged for some pro-ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) posters to be displayed during the rally to portray the secular opposition as supportive of radical Islam. ²⁸

Finally, in January 2017, government sources accused the staunchly pro-Western and secular political movement, REAL, whose chairman, Ilgar Mammadov, was serving a 7-year prison term since February 2013 for his alleged participation in mass unrest in January that year in the provincial town of Ismayilli (200 km west of Baku) (RFE/RL, 2014), of “agreeing to collaborate with, and accepting funding from, Iranian diplomats.” Dismissed by REAL as “rubbish and absurdity,” this allegation followed a visit earlier that month to REAL’s Baku office by the second secretary at the Iranian embassy and was intended, according to some commentators, “to blacken the movement in the eyes of Western public opinion and undermine the campaign by the Council of Europe and other organisations to secure the release of its [c]hairman Il[g]ar Mam[ma]dov” (Fuller, 2017; Majid, 2017a, 2017b). ²⁹

Concluding points and summary

Besides a range of practical measures aimed at stifling the penetration of Islamic discourse in public spaces (including a ban on using loudspeakers during the call to prayer, a ban on wearing Islamic headscarves in public schools, closing down mosques with a massive following, etc.), the symbolic violence ³⁰ the Azerbaijani political establishment has directed toward Islam, including as part of its quest for legitimation vis-à-vis both the secular domestic populace and the West, has involved at least five intricately linked discursive lines:

1. Upholding a narrative associating any upsurge of religiosity with the rise of Islamic “extremism” and thus framing it as a threat to state security and domestic stability, particularly if the growth in religious practice finds expression in the rising public activism of religiously inspired groups and individuals (and thus transforms from an individual identity marker into a social phenomenon);

2. Contrasting the dictate of Islamic fundamentalism in neighboring Iran and the rising tendency of insecurity, destruction, and war across the Middle East with the overall secular nature of Azerbaijani statehood and stability and security at home;

3. Linking any trend of rising religiosity to—and grounding it in—poverty, illiteracy, and backwardness, thus effectively rendering it a quality of the outcast;

4. Attributing expressions of religiously inspired public activism to the influence or direct sponsorship of foreign agents (in particular Iran), these allegedly using Islam to radicalize domestic politics in Azerbaijan; and

5. Promoting secular nationalism (including as upheld in the face of the ongoing conflict with Armenia) and homogeneously empty multiculturalism as an alternative ideological vision around which to mobilize society (cf. Corley & Kinahan, 2012).

As such, the regime’s quest for the negative representation of Islam has pursued two mutually reinforcing objectives: one addressing the international audience and the other targeting the domestic populace.

In reproducing the post-9/11 notion of “fundamentalist” Islam as a security threat and thus portraying Islamic activism at home as the product of a foreign (read: Iranian) conspiracy, the elite have sought to position themselves as the only potent leadership able and willing to contain Islam’s rising political clout in the country and safeguard the secular nature of Azerbaijani statehood. Meant to justify the need for firm authoritarian control to properly address these challenges, this effort has become an increasing feature in the elite’s engagement with Islam as the regime has grown ever more authoritarian and as its governance model has begun to elicit still greater criticism from the West.

Besides its quest for Western legitimation and “recognition,” the goal on a domestic level has been to discredit any topic that could potentially mobilize the population, of which Islam and ethnicity are the most potent. As Azerbaijani human rights lawyer and activist Khalid Baghirov aptly described it,

In fact, there is one thing this government wants in Azerbaijan [and that is] to localise people. Because authoritarian regimes localise people—that is, detach people from each other, destroy people’s trust in each other, and rule upon this. The government in this country wants one thing: to have an atmosphere of mutual distrust established [within and between various] social groups . . . [such that] there is no trust between people on either religious or ethnic topics, or in other [similar] areas, because mutual trust between people leads to joint action and joint action is [perceived as] a threat. ³¹

As part of this latter line of action, the elite have been using the narrative to stigmatize religious activists and political enemies more broadly as Islamic fundamentalists to legitimate a crackdown against them across the domestic and international planes of power.