Harem Years: the Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879-1924), Margot Badran’s translation of the Egyptian political activist and feminist Huda Sha’arawi’s Arabic memoirs Mudhakirati, appears into an already commodified representation of Arab women’s lives. One review of Badran’s translation reads Harem Years evidently, rather than critically, describing Sha’arawi heroicism: “a child and a woman in the household, she had to overcome the burden of the ordinary.” Another reviewer suggests that “nonspecialist” readers would need “further discussion of polygamy and concubinage… These are exotic notions to a Western reader. They were, however, the source of serious problems for Sha’arawi – who left her husband because of his attachment to a concubine – ….” (emphasis mine). An all too familiar theme threads these reviews: that which sees Egyptian women’s domestic life – here, specifically, represented in the harem -- as exotic, as a source of oppression, and, most significantly, as impervious to revolution and inhospitable to political agency. This paper proposes a reading of Harem Years as a mediated representation, rather than as a faithful translation, of Sha’arawi’s Mudhakirati. Through a mixture of historical and textual analysis that attends among other things to matters of genre, market, narrative strategy and reception, this paper reveals Sha’arawi’s memoirs to be a story of movement: linguistic, generic and temporal, as well as – most notably -- political. That is, this paper decodes how a text can be multiply worlded through a reading of the Arabic Mudhakirati (1981), alongside its English translation Harem Years (1986). I argue that Sha’arawi’s Mudhakirati takes up a position within the domestic sphere to emphasize the author’s intergenerational, elite, nationalist lineage both prior to and after the 1919 Revolution. Her descriptions of care-taking rituals affirm her elite socioeconomic status and validate her position as an international representative of Egypt. In stark contrast, the decisions made in the English translation insist on Orientalist depictions of the harem as both a space of frivolity and of oppression. This difference in translation, I contend, is emblematic of the analytical frames and descriptive tropes that persist in Western representations of Arab women.