The outsize households of Muslim royals and elite drove the enslavement of multitudes of women and castrated boys for over 1200 years. As late as the eighteenth century, Mouley Ismail (d. 1727) from the current ruling family of Morocco, possessed a harem numbering between 500 and 2000 concubines, including many European captives of the Barbary corsairs. Owning numerous slave concubines, however, fell out of fashion and lost its prestige value under the onslaught of modernity and competition with western values. The Young Turks invaded Istanbul and dismantled the harem of the Ottoman Sultan in 1909. Still concubinage and female slavery continued in Turkey and in Mediterranean Muslim lands under colonial power for several more decades. Islamic traditional scholars argued that Sharia law could never outlaw slavery and concubinage because Mohammed possessed his own concubines and had never forbidden the practice. This paper examines the end of royal harems and female slavery in the Muslim Mediterranean but questions whether concubinage and other forms of coerced sex work in the region ever completely disappeared, even before the resurrection of sex slavery by militant groups in the twenty-first century.