My paper explores how literary modernity in Ottoman Turkish and Arab literatures played out in the historical novels of the Syrian Christian author Jurji Zaydan (1861-1914) and Turkish author Ahmet Hikmet Muftuoglu (1870-1927) at the beginning of the twentieth century. The historical novels of these authors were serialized in the journals Al-Hilal in Egypt and Tasvir-i Efkar in the Ottoman Empire. I argue that through fiction, both authors use historical settings as analogy for existing hierarchies of gender and race at the beginning of the twentieth century in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Women’s seclusion, education, rights, freedom and roles in society were crucial debates among intellectuals both in Cairo and in Istanbul at the beginning of the twentieth century. By analyzing how Zaydan and Muftuoglu treat these issues in their fiction, we can discern their views on women’s rights and roles as influenced by the increasingly active female voices of the “women’s press” in the Ottoman Turkish and Arab public spheres. By looking at the ways in which serialization shaped the way fiction is presented, we see the emergence of new avenues in which ideas on social issues and modernity were transmitted to the public. The paper thereby attempts to show how Zaydan and Muftuoglu, writing serialized and popular works of fiction as male intellectuals, repeat/validate some gender stereotypes and hierarchies while criticizing and attempting to modify others. At the turn of the century, these issues were widely discussed and prominent in the public spheres of Istanbul and Cairo, and by analyzing these fictional works in their context, we can trace how these debates are reflected in the realm of serialized, popular historical fiction.