Yeah, I...basically ignored any amount of that stuff with the setting I built with my players, which was (in part) inspired by Zakhara. That is, there might be some of these unfortunate things occurring somewhere in the Tarrakhuna, but they aren't particularly relevant as a cultural practice.
Frankly, I don't see any reason why "uglier" aspects of past extant societies need to be included in new authored works. For example, it is historically factual that Al-Andalus, one of the primary IRL historical periods/cultural groups I've drawn on, practiced slavery in a way that was, in practice, almost purely race-based. (Technically it was religion-based, but realistically, they imported massive numbers of Central and Eastern European Christians.) Yet, despite the fact that slavery was rampant in Al-Andalus, my setting emphatically forbids it, for its own cultural reasons.* This is not an accident, but it doesn't make the Tarrakhuna suddenly alien and weird compared to either the IRL historical/cultural inspirations nor the literary inspirations both fiction and non-fiction (e.g. the Thousand and One Nights, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, the Rihla, the Kitab al-I'tibar, etc.) My players and I collaborated on what is or isn't in this world, and one of the biggest requirements I had, though I did not explicitly state it, was that the world be "bright" enough to actually be worth saving/protecting. Together, we made sure that that is true.
I did something similar with the primary religions of the setting. The dominant religious force, which is the "new" faith (though "new" is relative--both have existed for well over a thousand years), is the Safiqi priesthood. They accept priests regardless of gender, because their monotheistic deity, the One, is explicitly pre-gender; our concepts of "male" and "female" arise out of aspects of the One. There may be specific, relatively obscure sects that admit only men or only women, and it is known that some monasteries choose to have members of only one gender. But all are welcome in the priesthood regardless of their gender identity specifically because the One is too vast, too infinite. The "old" faith, which is still quite strong despite being a distinct second now, are the Kahina, the shamans and druids who deal with the nature-spirits and quelling the restless spirits of the unquiet dead, and they don't care about gender either, because they were founded long, long ago. Back then, mortal-kind was eking out a hardscrabble existence in the vast wastes between the genie-rajah cities. You never turned down a promising student because you never knew when you might find another. Nature can be a cruel mistress, and she does not look kindly on fools who put pointless restrictions before survival.
We, as creators, have the power to create worlds that are better than our own in various ways. That doesn't mean we must close our eyes and plug our ears. We can still face the wickedness that exists or existed. We can know, as the Shadow knows, what evil lurks in the hearts of men; we can build places and worlds where that evil is real and dangerous and lurking, without one where that evil is entrenched and pervasive and successful.
*Specifically, the current culture of the Tarrakhuna arose in part from throwing off the shackles of slavery to the ancient genie-rajahs, who were forced to abandon the mortal world for Al-Akirah, the elemental otherworld, where they formed the modern "country" of Jinnistan. (Modern Jinnistani nobles, naturally, deny that their ancestors were driven out, and claim that they willingly departed the world. The evidence is highly equivocal, so likely it's a mix of both.) As a result of literally being founded through a mortal slave revolt, the idea of enslaving other mortal beings is extremely not okay in the eyes of modern residents of the Tarrakhuna. That doesn't mean some people don't do it--they surely do, just as some people try here in the US--but it's a crime basically everywhere and being caught in mortal trafficking is basically a one-way ticket to financial and personal ruin.
