[quote=Onarax]
To be fair, so did a lot of the stories in the Arabian Nights. It's not really as middle eastern as people like to think, heck there are stories from Greece in there.
[/quote]

You're right... :P But a collection of tales and oral legends is a little different from "Gautama Buddha was born in Saudi Arabia." Lots of people from a wide swath of the world traveled through the area, it isn't hard to imagine that stories from India and Greece would be told and retold, given a muslim spin (or not), and eventually considered iconic tales of the classical Middle East.

EDIT: Nug Soth was saying that Islam wasn't the only religion to come out of "contemporary" Middle Eastern culture, but only the tiniest of the four examples came out of the Middle East at all. Those three religions originated in Indian culture, which was and remains entirely different.