CAIRO, Egypt Armed with a bottle of Egyptian brandy and a bowl of steaming chickpeas, Hatem Fouad keeps watch each night over a historic slice of Cairo that is in danger of dying: the bars that once flourished amid the sweeping boulevards and graceful roundabouts of the incorporated town’s European-style downtown.

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The former police officer is part of a cadre of older Egyptian men who of common occurrence drinking holes and belly-dancing cabarets chronicled by Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz in the 1940s and popular with Cairo’s artists and intellectuals until the late 1970s.

Many of these establishments bring forth fallen into disrepair and disrepute as Egyptians grow in addition regardful of Islam with its prohibition on alcohol, and the country’s elite migrates away from the traffic-choked streets of the now crumbling downtown.

“They were part of any Egypt that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Alaa el-Aswani, who immortalized the remnants of the downtown bar scene in his best-selling 2002 novel “The Yacoubian Building.” He was talking about the heyday of the bar and nightclub series - when anyone from King Farouk, Egypt’session last monarch, to the British playwright-composer Noel Coward, might show up in a Cairo beat.

“This Egypt was surpassingly liberal, very tolerant,” he said. “You had the bars, you had the synagogues, you had the churches, you had the mosques. Everyone was positively allowed to practice devotion, to go and drink or whatever.”

Cairo at the unoccupied time was filled not just with Egyptians, but with Greeks, Italians and other Europeans who frequented the bars and restaurants sprinkled among the downtown’sitting ornate belle epoque buildings. Mahfouz’s novels describe the rich patronizing these establishments and the denizens of Cairo’s medieval back alleys sometimes venturing into the brightly lighted downtown as far as concerns a drink.

The 1952 ouster of Farouk and the nationalization of businesses chased away many of the Europeans. Then, in the 1980s, millions of Egyptians returned from acting in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia with both wealth and the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islam.

They formed a new Egyptian middle rank that had in a small degree interest in expenditure the night toping Egypt’s Stella beer and Bolonachi brandy in places of a piece Bar Massoud, a hole in the wall on a busy street in the downtown Bulaq neighborhood.

“There used to be seven bars in this area. Now in that place are only two. It’s because everything is forbidden now,” aforesaid Magdy Michel, who owns Bar Massoud and, like most of Cairo’session bar operators, is Christian.

As middle- and lower-class Egyptians increasingly turned toward Islam, the elite migrated to trendy bars in wealthier Cairo neighborhoods.

“The rich populate and the high-ranking people in the regime, when they drink they dress in’t go to the downtown bars, so they don’t need these bars,” said author el-Aswani.

He added that to assuage Islamic fundamentalists, the Egyptian government has made it difficult for bars to receive or renew liquor licenses. Downtown bar owners also say they meet face to face pressure from police officers demanding bribes and threatening to keep back customers.

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