Borrowing insight from Michel Foucault about the authoritarian nature of modern education, this paper evaluates lay and religious education of Muslim girls in Libya between 1911 and 1943. It argues that to the extent secular assimilationist policies existed in Libya based on the French model, they almost completely excluded Libyan women. Italian colonial officials limited investment in state run education for Muslim girls based on their own interpretation of respect for local customs, arguing that the establishment of schools for female Muslim students aroused opposition since the education of girls was seen as contrary to Islam. The only state-funded schools for girls during the first decades of Italian rule were professional schools for lower class Libyan girls that focused on the production of textiles. While largely ignoring assimilation, these schools had a civilizing component of teaching hygiene, but the limited number of pupils largely left women out of the secular civilizing project. The second part of the paper evaluates the area of education most open to Libyan girls: French missionary education. While the colonial government explicitly prohibited proselytism, a limited number of girls were included in a religious civilizing mission through missionary schools. This section will look at the gendered and racial assumptions at the heart of missionary education and the lasting impact of the religious mission on the lives of Muslim girls, including their later involvement in the Libyan literary scene. Finally, the religious civilizing mission was also mobilized against parts of the European settler populations in the last decades of Italian rule. As a result, the third section examines the activities of female Catholic teaching congregations, exploring their contribution to the colonial educational project. Utilizing missionary correspondences, colonial reports, and Libyan literature, this paper reframes previous assumptions about identity, culture, gender, race and education under colonial rule.