Elite Egyptian writers framed cafés as infected dens of idleness and vice

Evidence

The café in Cairo is a place where the rabble gathers … in a space so confined that its occupants are almost overcome by the fumes that rise from the stoves and the smoke of the pipes and nargilehs; so that a person who walks in feels he has entered a burning fire, or the cramped confines of a prison. It is the source of numerous infections and diseases, and a refuge for the unemployed and the indolent, particularly in those places known for the consumption of hashish. The only thing one hears once inside are words repugnant to the ear and offensive to one’s nature. The place is a scene of continual arguments and fights. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 375

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes how the French-colonial ‘café’ was pathologized in similar moral terms — and parallels the reader’s article on immodesty moral panics as class/identity signaling.
• ADDENDUM: Supports ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: this is a parallel cross-cultural moral panic where elite observers pathologize working-class leisure spaces.