This paper builds on Remke Kruk’s recent scholarship (The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature, 2014). In her study of the popular epic from the pre-modern period, Kruk discusses characters such as Dhat al-Himma, the Woman of Resolve, who confront men in battle and defeat them. This paper contributes to Kruk’s scholarship by identifying similar heroines in stories from 1001 Nights. As a result, a more complex and less stereotypical image of women in early Arabic literature begins to emerge. The main part of this paper discusses portrayals of women in two stories from 1001 Nights, “The Debate between Tawaddud the Slave Girl and the Scholars” and “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad.” In the first, a slave girl of Harun al-Rashid astonishes the court by debating learned men in Qur’an, jurisprudence, medicine, astrology, and philosophy. She defeats them all, much in the way that Dhat al-Himma disposes of her enemies on the battlefield, even dethroning champions of chess and backgammon in the process. In the second, specifically in the framed dervish’s tale at the story’s center (like many other classical Arabic works, “The Porter” is arranged according to ring composition), we find the striking example of a princess engaged in mortal combat with a jinni to save a threatened prince. Both fighters go through multiple transformations into various animals and elements, before the courageous princess resorts to fire, killing her adversary therewith. She then returns to human form. Thus these interior stories from the collection contribute to the overall feminist message of 1001 Nights, which features, as is known, the courageous and inventive Shahrazad as its main heroine. In sum, not only does this paper analyze two remarkable stories of 1001 Nights structurally and thematically, but it also places them in a broader context alongside the popular epic. In consequence, we begin to see a more rounded picture of women in classical Arabic literature. Courtly classical Arabic poetry and prose largely celebrates traditional male virtues, such as courage and generosity, and typically addresses women, or describes them, as love objects for the men. Yet in popular literature, as we see, the women may take on very active roles, even overcoming or replacing the men in their fields of dominance. As a whole, classical Arabic literature, including its popular forms, may be seen to feature a variety of traditional and nontraditional representations of women.