The contemporary social studies curriculum remains surprisingly far from gender balanced. Women in the social studies are placed marginally--except for the large number of teachers and teacher educators who happen to be women. Teachers motivated to include women in global education or world history courses confront numerous problems, including lack of appropriate materials and shallow knowledge of women's lives around the world. In an attempt to address this problem, the author suggests an approach of teaching about women through fiction--a popular pedagogical strategy aimed at bridging cultural differences through imagination and empathy. In this article, the author considers "Shabanu," a popular novel often found in middle school classrooms, to raise questions about the use of fiction in teaching about women of the world so that teachers will reflect more deeply on the forms of representation operating within their classrooms. Here, she describes how she introduced the novel into master's level course at Teachers College, Columbia University, and how Muslim students voiced strenuous objections and comments to the novel, which can be sorted out into three themes. These themes: (1) The problem of "insider/outsider status" in writing a book about Muslim women; (2) The "effects of literature" on students in a classroom; and (3) "Shabanu" as a piece of "biased and colonial literature," are discussed. (Contains 18 notes.)