by Taras Kuzio
Every state eventually learns the same lesson: what an outside power cannot seize by force, it
will try to acquire through the institutions its citizen’s trust. In the South Caucasus those
institutions are not parliaments or ministries. They are mosques and churches. Who controls
them is therefore a question of national security, and Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia have
answered it in very different ways. The contrast is instructive for every former Soviet state,
Muslim or Christian, that wishes to remain sovereign.
A secular choice made twice
Azerbaijan’s secularism is not simply a Soviet leftover. In 1918 the Azerbaijan Democratic
Republic became the first secular democratic republic in the Muslim world, and it gave women
the vote before the home of two revolutions – the United States and France. Seven decades of
Soviet rule then imposed a coercive, atheist version of the same idea, which discredited the word
for many but also hollowed out an independent clerical class. When Azerbaijan regained
independence in 1991 it could have filled that vacuum with imported religious authority, but
instead its constitution declared it to be a secular state in which religion is separate from
government.
That choice has paid dividends. Azerbaijan is a Shia-majority country that is also a partner of
Israel, Türkiye and Europe’s energy markets, as well as home to a Sunni minority, a historic
Jewish community and Christian congregations that live without the sectarian violence that has
scarred much of the Greater Middle East. As analysts at the European Foundation for Democracy
have argued, Azerbaijan is tangible evidence that secularism is not antithetical to Islam but the
framework in which believers of different denominations, and non-believers, can coexist.
The Pressure from the South
Geography makes this more than an abstract virtue. To the south lies the Islamic Republic of
Iran, whose political order rests on clerical authority and a claim to lead the Shia world, and
whose population includes tens of millions of Azerbaijanis. Iran’s tools are familiar: clerics
trained in Qom, funding for religious networks, pilgrimage routes through Karbala and Mashhad,
and sympathetic media. Eurasianet has reported Baku’s alarm that Iranian influence over Shia
practice grew after the government eased its informal restrictions on Iran-linked preachers in
2013, with the conservative settlement of Nardaran a focal point. Baku foiled an Iran- and
Hezbollah-linked plot against the Israeli embassy in 2008, and in 2012 arrested 22 suspects it
said Iran had trained to attack the US and Israeli embassies. A deadly security operation in
Nardaran in 2015 targeted an Iran-sympathetic Islamist group.
Azerbaijan also faces a Sunni flank. Salafi networks tied to Gulf donors, North Caucasus
insurgents and, later, the Islamic State encouraged preachers and recruits to travel to Azerbaijan.
Baku responded by making becoming a foreign fighter a crime. Only a secular state can demand
religious movements cannot take direction from, or serve as the political proxy of, a foreign
government or a foreign ideology.
That is the heart of the defence of secularism in Azerbaijan.
Secularism denies Tehran has the right to claim to speak for Azerbaijan’s Shia. It allows the state
to register religious organisations and refuse those that preach discriminatory or violence. It
keeps the clergy out of party politics. Finally, it prevents religious identity from becoming the
primary axis of loyalty on which a hostile neighbour would like to operate.
The Test from Ankara
The newest test of Baku’s model has come not from Tehran but from its closest ally. As Paul
Goble writes for the Jamestown Foundation, Azerbaijan banned pupils from wearing the hijab in
state schools on 21 September and extended the restriction to teachers on 6 October. Officials
avoided blaming a threat from Iran, but the move was widely read as an effort to keep schools
from becoming seedbeds of Iranian-backed radicalism.
Pupils, parents and activists protested, and some were arrested. Goble argues that the ban has
exposed the limits of the “one nation, two states” formula, because President Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan’s Türkiye, which has woven Islam into state ideology, no longer shares Baku’s secular
model. Protesters in Istanbul chanted that “such a state cannot be our brother,” while Azerbaijani
President Ilham Aliyev retorted that Türkiye has no right to teach Azerbaijan how to live.
Middle East Eye’s Ragip Soylu reports that the dispute escalated into unprecedented attacks on
Ankara by Azerbaijani media, only two weeks after Türkiye signed $500m in defence contracts
in Baku. This began when President Aliyev rebuked Ankara over Erdoğan’s UN criticism of
barriers to education for Muslim girls, and deepened when presidential adviser Oktay Saral and
AKP deputy chair Leyla Şahin Usta urged Baku to reverse the ban. Baku reportedly demanded
Saral’s dismissal, while media outlets accused Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan of plotting
unrest and the AKP (Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi]), the ruling
party in Türkiye, of exporting Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood ideology through NGOs and the
TIKA (Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency).
Türkiye is perhaps unable to sense the acute sensitivity of these questions because of the threat
from Iranian extremism. Baku’s secularism is aimed at any foreign power seeking to shape
Azerbaijani religious life, even a treaty ally like Türkiye.
Orthodoxy and the Kremlin
Now consider the Christian side of the South Caucasus, where the threat is not a revolutionary
state like Iran but a patriarchate. The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill has
become a pillar of the Kremlin’s “Russian World” ideology and blessess Russia’s war against
Ukraine as a “Holy War”.
Ukraine has moved to restrict the Russian Orthodox Church on the grounds that it has
collaborated with the Russian aggressor. Georgia and Armenia have not yet drawn comparable
lessons, and their Churches continue to be pro-Russian.
Georgia
The Georgian Orthodox Church is the country’s most trusted institution, and for nearly half a
century Patriarch Ilia II embodied it. He trained at the Moscow Theological Academy, yet he
also called for an end to hostilities when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and saw a modernising
potential in cooperation with the EU.
When he passed away on 17 March 2026 the situation changed. Within two weeks Russia’s SVR
(Foreign Intelligence Service) issued an unusually direct statement accusing Ecumenical
Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I of trying to destabilise the Georgian Church, which
analysts read as the Kremlin staking a claim in the succession. On 11 May the Georgian church
council elected Shio Mujiri, long seen as close to the ruling Georgian Dream party and to the
Russian Orthodox Church.
Patriarch Mujiri is known for his hostile rhetoric toward “liberal ideologies” and he opposed
autocephaly for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Claims that the Kremlin smoothed his path
remain speculative, and the Patriarchate denies them.
Nevertheless, the pattern is hard to miss. Georgia, a country that lost a war to Russia in 2008
now has a church hierarchy whose conservative worldview is anti-European and echoes the
Kremlin’s, and a governing party that has floated making Orthodoxy the state religion.
Armenia
The Armenian Apostolic Church preserved Armenian identity for centuries without a state of its
own, but its hierarchy is not insulated from Moscow. Poland’s Centre for Eastern Studies notes
that Catholicos Karekin II’s brother, Archbishop Yezras, heads the Church’s eparchy covering
most of Russia, Belarus, Moldova and Central Asia.
In 2024 Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan led pro-Russian protests demanding Prime Minister
Nikol Pashinyan’s resignation. In June 2025, days after the Russian-Armenian oligarch Samvel
Karapetyan was arrested for publicly backing the Church and calling for political change,
Galstanyan and Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan were detained over an alleged plot to seize
power. The Church, Karapetyan and the opposition deny the charges, describing them as political
persecution.
Whatever the courts conclude, the electoral aftermath is telling. In June 2026 Pashinyan’s Civil
Contract won roughly 49.7 percent of the vote and 64 seats, but Karapetyan’s pro-Russian Strong
Armenia came second with 29 percent. A bloc built around a Russian-linked oligarch who
championed the Church’s cause now holds nearly a third of the seats in Armenia’s parliament.
The Kremlin’s influence in Yerevan is through oligarchs and the pro-Russian Armenian Church.
One Vulnerability, Two Patrons
Iran’s lever is doctrine; Russia’s is hierarchy and community. The mechanisms differ but the
vulnerability is the same: a religious institution with transnational ties, deep social authority and
little distance from a foreign patron’s networks. Azerbaijan narrowed that gap by insisting that
religion be subjected to national laws and answer to no external power. Georgia, whose Church
has enjoyed a privileged status under a 2002 agreement with the state, and Armenia, where the
Church is woven into national identity, left the door ajar to the Kremlin’s influence. A church
that cannot be criticised, regulated or questioned by its own society is an attractive asset for a
foreign intelligence service, in this case Russian. A mosque is no different, in this case Iranian.
National sovereignty is indivisible. A state that allows a foreign capital to shape the
appointments, finances and political messaging of its dominant religious body has outsourced
part of its foreign and security policy.
What Follows
Western policymakers would be wise to back Azerbaijan’s secular model and to seek
transparency from Georgia and Armenia about the foreign ties and financing of clerical
networks. For these three societies themselves, the lesson is that independence is not secured at
their borders alone. Where a foreign power can reach the church or mosque, it can also reach
citizens.
Secularism in Azerbaijan is not hostile to religion or Islam. It is a statement about who is
sovereign. Baku understood this early, as has Ukraine, while Tbilisi and Yerevan are learning it
late and at a cost to their national sovereignty.
Taras Kuzio is a Professor of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, co-
editor of Russia and Modern Fascism. New Perspectives on the Kremlin’s War Against Ukraine
(Columbia University Press, 2025) and author of Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War
(Routledge, 2022 and 2027).
