The Middle East

First, before you proceed with this lesson, please respond to the following questions in your blog. If I were to ask you to conjure images of India or China, what comes to mind? Take a moment to say to yourself “the Middle East”—what are the images, feelings and words that follow?

After reading the folktales on e-reserve, do they remind you of any western tales? What do they reveal to you about Turkey and Afghanistan?

India: Great food, Hinduism, caste systems, turbulent past
China: Communism, bicycles, great wall, cool architecture
Middle East: Islam, music, food, colonialism, prejudice by the west, and unfortunately, Islamic terrorism.

Really, the tales don't specifically remind me of any western tales. There is the element of a moral, sort of, in each of them, but not as clean or direct of a moral as those in western tales.