[quote=Dervish]
Most big fantasy settings are set in medieval European inspired settings, so it's what people are familiar with. Knights, kingdoms, and dragons and the lot are easy to conjure up in the mind compared to say Mamluks, Caliphates, and sphinxes for a lot of people. Usually when people read the word fantasy as a descriptor, Westeros, Middle Earth, Tamriel, and countless others come to mind, most with heavy European slants. Sure, a lot have Middle Eastern inspired places (Dorne in ASoIaF, Hammerfell in The Elder Scrolls, for instance) but we seldom see much of those places so they aren't immediately what come to mind. People like to roleplay what they're familiar with, so it doesn't surprise me that Arabian inspired settings aren't very common. I'm sure if you looked at an Arabic roleplaying site, their fantasy games would probably have a lot more settings reflecting Sinbad the Sailor, among others. It isn't that people are "afraid" of Arabs as much as it's not something people are familiar with. it's also the reason you don't really see anything having to do with Chinese mythology in the vein of Jade Empire, that excellent BioWare RPG, because people really don't know much about that kind of setting.
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Derv you have to admit that tons of Western fantasy does associate darkness with evil, whether it be with clothing or skin. Yeah a lot of that's just old-school thinking, but let's not pretend that some of the best western lore did include, by today's standards, fear, resentment, etc of dark people -- Arabs or otherwise. If we're really honest the middle ages was a time of power for Asia and the Middle East with Europe largely a battleground between empires and apparently barbaric peoples. With so much of our fantasy growing from this time, we might also recognize that Islam came into its own then too, and was considered a threat to Christianity as a whole (Dante speaks to this pretty clearly). Not trying to derail the convo, but hey, I'm American, raised in a white household myself and it's pretty clear that our stories don't exactly prep us to meet Arabs or any dark person with trust, love, and compassion. 

Dinh I think it's a mix of engrained fear and a lack of knowledge. America isn't exactly a place that thrives on cultural diversity, let alone teaching other cultural myths/lore. I'd be down for this too, granted, I'm not the biggest fan of such an event-by-event alternate history. If you're looking to create a wave of these types of RPs I'm totally down though.