Azerbaijan’s top Shia Muslim cleric, closely tied to the country’s authoritarian regime, renewed his attacks on the Armenian Apostolic Church on Wednesday amid Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s escalating efforts to unseat its supreme head, Catholicos Karekin II.
Sheikh-ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazade, a longtime ally of Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev, accused the Church of inciting Armenians to “fight to the death” in a letter to the World Council of Churches, which recently hosted an international conference in Switzerland on preserving Artsakh’s (Nagorno-Karabakh) Armenian religious and cultural heritage.
“I call on the World Council of Churches not to support the provocative, revanchist propaganda of the Armenian Church that violates the fragile peace environment,” he wrote.
In a speech delivered during the three-day conference, Catholicos Karekin condemned Azerbaijan for committing ethnic cleansing in Artsakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas. He also denounced the ongoing “sham trials” of eight former Artsakh leaders captured during Azerbaijan’s September 2023 assault, calling them hostages.
Karekin addressed the forum in Bern as Pashinyan launched a barrage of daily social media attacks against the Church’s top clergy—sparking outrage from opposition leaders, prominent public figures, and citizens across Armenia. The prime minister accused Karekin and other senior clergymen of secret sexual misconduct, in violation of their vows of celibacy. He has since escalated his campaign, demanding the Catholicos’s resignation and vowing to establish a body tasked with installing a new Church leader.
Armenian opposition leaders have condemned the move as unconstitutional and warned Pashinyan against ordering loyalists to seize the Church’s headquarters in Etchmiadzin. They argue that Pashinyan—who notably refrains from publicly criticizing Azerbaijan—launched this smear campaign to placate Baku and undermine a key institution opposing his one-sided concessions to Armenia’s longtime enemy.
Pashazade had previously attacked the Armenian Church in May, announcing plans to open a new division of his state-backed Muslim office to cover Armenian territory. Echoing Ilham Aliyev’s irredentist rhetoric, he claimed that much of modern-day Armenia lies on “historical Azerbaijani lands.” He also branded the Armenian Apostolic Church—a cornerstone of Armenian identity and history—as a threat to the region.
The Church’s Mother See in Etchmiadzin dismissed Pashazade’s claims in a May 23 statement as “absurd” and “ridiculous.”
“Such reprehensible expressions of enmity and falsification, consistently present in the public rhetoric of Azerbaijan’s religious leadership, are themselves testimony to the very reality that — to borrow Pashazade’s phrasing — Azerbaijan poses a threat to the neighboring countries of the region,” the statement read.
Pashinyan’s attacks on the Church escalated in the days following that statement. His latest posts on Wednesday morning came just hours after Catholicos Karekin returned from abroad to a hero’s welcome by hundreds of supporters at Yerevan’s Zvartnots Airport.
Addressing the crowd, the Catholicos expressed confidence that the Church and its faithful would “overcome this difficulty prudently and without excessive emotion or agitation.”
