Early Egyptian fiction depicted the street crowd as an undisciplined force breaking European norms

Evidence

This combination of the unruly commotion of life and the absence of all moral and political discipline repeats itself in almost every episode of the novel. The crowd is encountered not only in the brothel and the café but even at the final place they visit on their journey, the theatre. The theatre in Europe (a companion explains to the Pasha) is a place where people’s morals are refined, by the portrayal of their history and other themes in dramatic form. Here it was very different. The actors danced, shouted, and caroused on stage, and the audience, composed of people from every class, did not sit silently like Europeans, as spectators, but joined in, laughing and applauding as a raucous crowd. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘immodesty’ moral-panic theme in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — the theater crowd’s raucous joining-in reads as a class/identity marker contrasted with European spectator decorum.