In The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade is the embodiment of the temptress whose tales serve to charm a misogynistic sultan. Her influence on him, and her tales, have nourished the imaginations of a number of contemporary writers who have sought to invent a sequel to the story, to add tales, or to use the same framework for placing their own works. Here the intent is to compare the image of Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights to that drawn by the novelist Naguib Mahfouz in Layali Alf Layla and the one created by the Egyptian playwright Tewfik El Hakim in Scheharazade. The purpose of this work is to understand the changes which have been made to the representation of the Oriental woman in contemporary Egyptian literature and the ways in which a literary tradition, as it evolves and is transformed, may stimulate modern writing.