By Azerbaijan.US Editorial Board
This week, the Tovuz district witnessed yet another horror that feels both shocking and painfully familiar. Twenty-nine-year-old Metanet Hajizade, mother of three, was murdered in her own home by her husband, Sabuhi Hajizade, 32.
According to investigators, the man, who had recently returned from Germany, stabbed his wife in the throat after a quarrel, filmed a video beside her body, confessed to the killing, and then took his own life.
In the video – now circulating online – he holds up a blood-stained knife and says he killed “out of jealousy.” He insists he isn’t afraid of prison but “doesn’t want to live anymore.” Moments later, his words become prophecy. Three small boys are now orphans.
And instead of uniting in disgust, part of society reacted with sympathy.
Comments flooded social media: “He was humiliated.” “A real man can’t stand betrayal.” “He had no other choice.”
That chorus of justification – cold, casual, collective – is the true national tragedy.
The cult of the wounded man
In our society, manhood is too often built on ownership. A wife is not a person; she is an asset, a reflection of pride, a boundary of honor. When that illusion is threatened, rage steps in to restore it.
We have mistaken jealousy for love, possession for protection, and revenge for justice.
Sabuhi did not act in a vacuum. He acted within a moral system that still praises the man who “defends his dignity” more than the one who walks away.
In that sense, his crime is not only personal – it’s cultural. It’s what happens when a man’s self-worth depends not on conscience but on reputation.
The ghost of ‘what will people say’
There is an ancient tyranny that rules countless homes in this region: the fear of “el nə deyər” – “what will people say.”
It dictates marriages, divorces, even deaths. It makes men choose violence over shame, and women choose silence over survival. It’s a primitive moral currency that rewards cruelty as long as it protects appearances.
What drives a husband, educated, traveled, living in Europe, to return and commit a crime that belongs to a cave age? The answer is simple: civilization is not geography.
You can spend years in Germany and still live by Neanderthal traditions if you never learn to see women as equals.
The society that applauds
The real sickness lies not only in the act but in the applause that follows. Each time a man kills and someone says, “He was right to do so,” the next man listens. The cycle continues because our moral outrage stops where our cultural vanity begins.
We scroll past the video, we sigh, we share it – and in doing so, we normalize it. Every view, every comment of sympathy becomes an instruction for another unstable mind: You are not alone if you kill for pride.
The forgotten victims
Three children in Tovuz are now caught between two graves – their mother’s and their father’s. Their lives will grow from this soil of trauma and silence. And we, the society that watched, will pretend to pity them while teaching the same lessons that made their parents’ story possible.
Until we stop glorifying the jealous man and start shaming the violent one, nothing will change. Until conscience matters more than gossip, until empathy weighs more than reputation, we will keep holding funerals and calling them tradition.
And perhaps one day
Perhaps one day, we will finally stop confusing ego with love – and stop mistaking murder for masculinity.
