Violence and repression serve only as detonators, igniting the volcanoes of public anger; the suppression of religious freedoms breeds nothing but widespread defiance against ruling regimes.

Recent history offers powerful lessons:

When Iraq’s Ba’ath Party declared its unjust war on Hussaini rituals, its policies brought nothing but further unrest.

Despite the machinery of repression, executions, and intimidation, these campaigns failed miserably to uproot religious allegiance from people’s hearts.

What Azerbaijan is pursuing is a stark manifestation of intellectual subservience and absolute dependence on the West and its radical secularism.

Nor are such figures, alienated from their own heritage, unprecedented.

One may encounter someone raised in a Shia family and community who nevertheless brazenly sets out to combat the hijab, modesty, and every authentic religious and moral value.

How astonishing is the silence of so-called feminist organisations, which close their eyes and turn a deaf ear to the blatant violations suffered by Azerbaijani women and the rights being stripped from them.

The reason for this silence is plain to see!

This war on the hijab and modesty is merely one link in a systematic project aimed at dismantling conservative societies.

They seek neither dignity nor honour for women; instead, they appear willing to see women stripped of their modesty and reduced to exposed bodies for the gaze and gratification of those driven by lust and unrestrained desire.