Children in the Islamic Empire generally did what their parents did. Girls never went to school, but they worked at home taking care of their brothers and sisters and cooking. Girls carried water from the well, and they went out to look for fuel for the fire. Boys usually worked in the fields, plowing or weeding. But some boys went to school in the madrasa, where they learned to recite the Koran, and also learned how to live an Islamic life.

Friendships were less emphasized in the Islamic world than family relationships. Usually people got their positions through an uncle or a cousin. But we do still hear of close friendships between both men and women.

When the free children grew up they usually got married. Most women married their first or second cousins. Islamic law allowed men to have up to four wives if they could take care of all of them equally, but most men still only had one wife. Some powerful traders and sheiks had more than one wife. Once they were married, women moved to their husband’s house and took care of his house. Women hardly ever went out of the house alone – when they went out, their husbands or brothers went with them, and they wore a veil covering their heads and sometimes their faces so nobody would see them.

Islamic law said that Muslims could not have Muslim slaves, so the slaves of the Islamic Empire were foreigners, captured in war or bought in slave markets. This did not stop slavery at all. A lot of people in the Islamic Empire were slaves. Many people from West Africa were forced to come to West Asia to work as slaves. Most of these slaves were poor fieldworkers, who worked too hard even when they were children and did not get enough to eat. Racism convinced some Islamic scholars that it was okay to force people to be slaves, because, as the North African historian Ibn Khaldun said about 1400 AD, "The black nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery because they... have attributes like those of dumb animals."

Some young Turkish, Mongol, Kurdish and Christian boys were bought from their families to be special slaves. They were raised in dormitories and well educated and trained in fighting. When they grew up, they became Mamluks or Janissaries – soldiers and advisors for the Muslim caliphs and sultans. Often these slaves became very powerful and famous. Some of them, like Saladin, even became rulers themselves.

As this suggests, there were people of many different races and skin colors living in the Islamic Empire. Some Janissaries were Christian boys, from Eastern Europe, and pale-skinned. Many of the people living in West Asia were the descendants of the Mesopotamians and the Assyrians, and a little darker-skinned. The Jews, too, were mainly colored like Arabs today. Enslaved people, who had originally come from Africa, were black. Further south, in Egypt and North Africa, people were a little bit darker still, especially in southern Egypt and the Sahara. Across the Sahara, in West Africa and East Africa, people were really black.

Then in the eastern part of the Islamic Empire, in Iran, people were more Asiatic-looking. These were the Turks and the Kurds (the Mongols were Turkish). In India, at the eastern end of the Islamic empire, the people were more Indo-European looking, but again darker-skinned.

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