This article argues that, in reading comparatively the Arabic and English versions of Hanan al-Shaykh’s 1980 Hikayat Zahra, a pattern of omitting race and racial language emerges in the English version, published in 1986. I use a close reading of the translation’s selective appropriation of the original’s racial and political language to argue for a more intersectional approach to Arabic women’s writing, even as I acknowledge the structural and institutional contexts and constraints under which they operate and circulate in the global market of ‘world literature’.