Interrogates the construction of sameness in medieval Arabic literature through a close reading of one story from the Thousand and One Nights. Antrim offers an argument about how an erotics of physical sameness renders a binary understanding of sex unsuitable for the study of premodern Islamic and Arabophone contexts, and how the reception of medieval Arabic materials reads a sexual binary into older works. The article engages conversations in the study of gender, Islam, race, and Arabic.