Recent developments in the study of world literature have adopted Wallerstein's world systems theory of “cores” and “peripheries” in an attempt to characterize the movement of and interaction between national literatures across geographical boundaries. Initially proposed by Franco Moretti in his "Conjectures on World Literature", this theory has formed the basis for many arguments involving the dependence of literary interactions on historically grounded power relationships. Though seemingly constructive and all-encompassing, the world systems theory explicitly disregards—and even assumes the absence of—a whole set of literary interactions between nations which are deemed to belong to the “periphery”. This essay examines the assumptions of the world systems theory and questions its validity as an overarching framework for understanding the operation of world literature. By studying the narrative construction and thematic elements of two folk narratives from distinct oral traditions—in particular, the Moro folk story “The Mythology of Mindanao” and The Thousand and One Nights’ orphan tale "The Story of Sinbad the Sailor”—this essay presents a case for the direct historical intersection between the national literatures of the Philippines and the Middle East. The existence of this direct literary interaction between so-called "peripheral" nations renders the core-periphery dichotomy, and hence the world systems theory as a whole, inadequate. In its stead, this essay proposes that the uniqueness of individual national literatures—ones which may be grounded in more universal notions of genre—must be acknowledged, and direct interactions between these literatures should not be deemed completely nonexistent in the face of more dominant literary traditions.