Harem of the Muhammad Ali dynasty

In the case of the Muhammad Ali dynasty, the harem was dissolved in the 1930s, when the women of the royal family left seclusion.

Muhammad Ali was appointed vice roy of Egypt in 1805, and by Imperial Ottoman example assembled a harem of slave concubines in the Palace Citadel of Cairo which, according to a traditional account, made his legal wife Amina Hanim declare herself to henceforth be his wife in name only, when she joined him in Egypt in 1808 and discovered his sex slaves.

[2][4] The khedive's harem was composed of between several hundreds to over a thousand enslaved women, supervised by his mother, the walida pasha,[2] and his four official wives (hanim) and recognized concubines (qadin).

[2][5] The enslaved female servants of the khedivate harem were manumitted and married off with a trosseau in strategic marriages to the male freedmen or slaves (kul or mamluk) who were trained to become officers and civil servants as freedmen, in order to ensure the fidelity of their husband's to the khedive when they began their military or state official career.

[11] In the mid 19th-century, the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms abolished the custom of training male slaves to become military men and civil servants, and replaced them with free students.