Tolerating Islam: State Normativity and the Invention of “Traditional” Islam in Azerbaijan (2000s–2020s)

This article analyses the religious policy of the Republic of Azerbaijan, where an official discourse promoting tolerance and multiculturalism coexists with the repression of religious communities, particularly Shia ones. Rather than treating this discourse as mere lip service concealing a harsher reality, the article takes it seriously as a normative apparatus that prescribes and legitimises certain public ways of being a believer. Drawing on official publications produced or sponsored by state religious institutions, on fieldwork conducted in Baku between 2022 and 2024, and on the legal framework and documented cases of repression, it shows how this discourse mobilises the literary canon and selected Quranic references to construct a “traditional”, scripturalist, minimalist, ecumenical and apolitical Islam. Building on Wendy Brown’s analysis of tolerance as a technology of governmentality, the article argues that tolerance is not at odds with repression. Tolerance does not in itself cause repression, but it provides its framework of legitimation: by defining the contours of legitimate religion through an ecumenism that prunes away whatever is not common to all confessions, it relegates any religious expression deemed excessive by the state to the realm of deviance.