The subject of the article is the first Muslim girls’ schools in the South Caucasus. The aim of the research is to reveal the ordeals involved in raising educated Muslim girls. When Imperial Russia settled in the South Caucasus, there were no schools in the region that met the educational standards of the time. Muslim children were educated in old-style mullakhanas. Girls were not normally allowed to receive education, and even if they were, they could not attend a coeducational school. Azerbaijani intellectuals who had graduated from Russian schools were convinced that these problems could be solved by educational reform. With this logic, they supported the education reform of the central government. At a later stage, the same group of intellectuals found different ways to generalize education. Eventually, the first secular Muslim girls’ school in the Muslim East opened in Baku in 1901.