Ha, you've actually touched on what became an obsession of European colonizers in the Middle East. The ability to map a city was closely connected in their minds with the ability to control a city, and that required new, straight-lined boulevards and urban developments.

So in Tunis you have the Ville Nouvelle adjacent to the old Medina. In the 19th century downtown Cairo was built along European lines by French architects, and so on. This was even carried down to the level of a strict organization and construction of model homes, as the traditional Arabic dwellings were thought to be too disordered even for an individual family life.

It's not really an academic answer, but if you spend a good amount of time walking around such cities they're not actually all that difficult to navigate. Mostly because they tend to be very small, and, in at least in the case of the Medinas of Tunisia (which, I think I've visited all of the ones in that wiki link except Monastir) all of the streets tend to circumnavigate or lead to a central mosque or ribat fortress which would likely have been the tallest structure. While the Medinas and Casbahs of North Africa are well-preserved I'm not entirely sure they can be described as being unique to the region, at least insofar as being narrow, maze-like pre-modern cities. The Old City of Jerusalem is quite similar. As are some of the medieval walled European cities. This image is intended as a joke and comes from my home state but even early modern cities can have the kind of maze-like result if allowed to develop organically and without concern for geographical neatness, as in the case of Roxbury, MA in the above (a neighborhood of Boston).

I'm less familiar with the crime and traffic issues of those old cities, unfortunately.

For European mapping of Middle Eastern peoples (and the endless number of culturally superior conclusions they drew from that about the disorder and sloppiness of Oriental culture) see Timothy Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt and Edward Said's Orientalism.