Comparisons that bring together the Middle East and Europe abound, but these comparisons all too often (and sometimes inadvertently) emphasize difference and insufficiency, especially by pinning the terms of comparison against each other, where Europe frequently masquerades as a model for the Middle East. This paper will focus on a literary comparison between twentieth century Turkey and Spain, and using this comparison, will explore whether and how we can think about the literary intersections between Europe and the Middle East without perpetuating East/West binaries, or hierarchical comparisons. As this paper will argue, the field of World Literature and its premises are especially appropriate for these more “equitable” comparisons, because they allow us to look at how ideas and themes circulate between different contexts with limited interaction. In this sense, World Literature might be able to move us away from comparisons that are formulated through a center/periphery, or colony/postcolony relationship, and towards new frameworks that emerge via thematic threads. The paper will focus particularly on two works by Orhan Pamuk and Juan Goytisolo, who both self-consciously use Middle East-Europe comparisons to challenge and subvert them. While Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Kar presents a world in which even the habitants of a small city in Eastern Turkey, cut off from the world by a snow storm, act and talk with a persistent image of Europe in mind, Juan Goytisolo’s 1995 novel El sitio de los sitios creates a world in which the borders between Europe and the Middle East are very much porous and indefinite, confusing the characters and the readers themselves, who nevertheless try to retain a distinction between the two. In both cases, the result is a dismantling of the ideas of a fixed Europe or Middle East, and consequently a productive complication of comparisons between the two. Using Sibel Irzik's notion of the "self-conscious critique of the allegorical impulse," the comparison of these authors will attempt to offer a comparative framework that purposefully moves away from a hierarchical model of the Middle East and Europe.