Conflict over headscarves highlights extreme points of school dress code in Dagestan

In Dagestan, some schools violate the schoolgirls’ rights by the requirement to wear a headscarf, while other schools, on the contrary, prohibit wearing a hijab, report journalist Svetlana Anokhina and blogger Maryam Alieva.

The “Caucasian Knot” has reported that in early September, a wide public outcry was provoked by a video about how a deputy principal of the school in the village of Madjalis was examining schoolchildren and letting only schoolgirls in headscarves into classrooms.

"Not letting a child go to school without a headscarf is like not letting a girl in a hijab go to school,” Svetlana Anokhina said. The journalist emphasizes it is unacceptable neither to require wearing headscarves, nor to ban schoolgirls from wearing hijabs.

Svetlana Anokhina points out that the attempt to tighten the dress code for schoolgirls in the Madjalis school was made amid other similar republican-level initiatives.

“We now have a lot of social activists who like to come up with all sorts of innovations, like a dress code for tourists or other stillborn initiatives. All this leads, first of all, to the fact that everyone looks at girls and women, who first of all find themselves in the position of victims,” said Svetlana Anokhina.

“The requirement to wear headscarves at school is an obvious violation of the schoolgirls’ rights, and the same violation takes place in case when schoolgirls are forced to take off their headscarves in another educational institution,” says Maryam Alieva, an author of the “Mountain Woman’s Diary” blog on Instagram. “We are talking about a violation of the right to education. Since if schoolgirls do not wear headscarves, they could not be let involved in the educational process and thereby they could be deprived of their right to education and their right to free choice of clothes,” Maryam Alieva told the “Caucasian Knot” correspondent.

The blogger pointed to a case in another rural school in Dagestan, when schoolgirls, on the contrary, were not allowed to go to school in headscarves. “The incident took place in a rural school in the mountains, and I was studying it. And in that school, a teacher banned schoolgirls from wearing headscarves. Moreover, he could not completely ban the headscarves, and he mocked the schoolgirls in every possible way, kicked them out of classes,” Maryam Alieva said.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on September 15, 2021 at 03:20 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.